-that he has made the Divine a part of all.
Again, if a picture in economics is before him, Emerson plunges down to
the things that ARE because they are BETTER than they are. If there is
a row, which there usually is, between the ebb and flood tide, in the
material ocean--for example, between the theory of the present order of
competition, and of attractive and associated labor, he would
sympathize with Ricardo, perhaps, that labor is the measure of value,
but "embrace, as do generous minds, the proposition of labor shared by
all." He would go deeper than political economics, strain out the
self-factor from both theories, and make the measure of each pretty
much the same, so that the natural (the majority) would win, but not to
the disadvantage of the minority (the artificial) because this has
disappeared--it is of the majority. John Stuart Mill's political
economy is losing value because it was written by a mind more "a
banker's" than a "poet's." The poet knows that there is no such thing
as the perpetual law of supply and demand, perhaps not of demand and
supply--or of the wage-fund, or price-level, or increments earned or
unearned; and that the existence of personal or public property may not
prove the existence of God.
Emerson seems to use the great definite interests of humanity to
express the greater, indefinite, spiritual values--to fulfill what he
can in his realms of revelation. Thus, it seems that so close a
relation exists between his content and expression, his substance and
manner, that if he were more definite in the latter he would lose power
in the former,--perhaps some of those occasional flashes would have
been unexpressed--flashes that have gone down through the world and
will flame on through the ages--flashes that approach as near the
Divine as Beethoven in his most inspired moments--flashes of
transcendent beauty, of such universal import, that they may bring, of
a sudden, some intimate personal experience, and produce the same
indescribable effect that comes in rare instances, to men, from some
common sensation. In the early morning of a Memorial Day, a boy is
awakened by martial music--a village band is marching down the street,
and as the strains of Reeves' majestic Seventh Regiment March come
nearer and nearer, he seems of a sudden translated--a moment of vivid
power comes, a consciousness of material nobility, an exultant
something gleaming with the possibilities of this life, an assurance
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