sign-post to Erebus, is
strong enough to go the other way. This strength of optimism, indeed
the strength we find always underlying his tolerance, his radicalism,
his searches, prophecies, and revelations, is heightened and made
efficient by "imagination-penetrative," a thing concerned not with the
combining but the apprehending of things. A possession, akin to the
power, Ruskin says, all great pictures have, which "depends on the
penetration of the imagination into the true nature of the thing
represented, and on the scorn of the imagination for all shackles and
fetters of mere external fact that stand in the way of its
suggestiveness"--a possession which gives the strength of distance to
his eyes, and the strength of muscle to his soul. With this he slashes
down through the loam--nor would he have us rest there. If we would dig
deep enough only to plant a doctrine, from one part of him, he would
show us the quick-silver in that furrow. If we would creed his
Compensation, there is hardly a sentence that could not wreck it, or
could not show that the idea is no tenet of a philosophy, but a clear
(though perhaps not clearly hurled on the canvas) illustration of
universal justice--of God's perfect balances; a story of the analogy or
better the identity of polarity and duality in Nature with that in
morality. The essay is no more a doctrine than the law of gravitation
is. If we would stop and attribute too much to genius, he shows us that
"what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no one man's
work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one,
sharing the same impulse." If we would find in his essay on Montaigne,
a biography, we are shown a biography of scepticism--and in reducing
this to relation between "sensation and the morals" we are shown a true
Montaigne--we know the man better perhaps by this less presentation. If
we would stop and trust heavily on the harvest of originality, he shows
us that this plant--this part of the garden--is but a relative thing.
It is dependent also on the richness that ages have put into the soil.
"Every thinker is retrospective."

Thus is Emerson always beating down through the crust towards the first
fire of life, of death and of eternity. Read where you will, each
sentence seems not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all.
If you would label his a religion of ethics or of morals, he shames you
at the outset, "for ethics is but a reflection