ideas--will, in a measure, account for the bewilderment of his
hearers. When I heard Emerson in 1871 before audiences in Baltimore
and Washington, I could see and feel this uncertainty and bewilderment
in his auditors.

His lectures could not be briefly summarized. They had no central
thought. You could give a sample sentence, but not the one sentence
that commanded all the others. Whatever he called it, his theme, as he
himself confesses, was always fundamentally the same: "In all my
lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the
private man. This the people accept readily enough and even with loud
commendations as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or
Literature, or the Household, but the moment I call it Religion they
are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which
they receive everywhere else to a new class of facts."

Emerson's supreme test of a man, after all other points had been
considered, was the religious test: Was he truly religious? Was his
pole star the moral law? Was the sense of the Infinite ever with him?
But few contemporary authors met his requirements in this respect.
After his first visit abroad, when he saw Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and others, he said they were all second-or third-rate men
because of their want of the religious sense. They all looked
backward to a religion of other ages, and had no faith in a present
revelation.

His conception of the divine will as _the eternal tendency to the good
of the whole, active in every atom, every moment_, is one of the
thoughts in which religion and science meet and join hands.

III

In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian worlds in their
making--the essays, the addresses, the poems. Here are the nebulae and
star-dust out of which most of them came, or in which their suggestion
lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his
printed volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of
aesthetic emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes are less promising,
I think, than the prose; they are evidently more experimental, and
show the 'prentice hand more.

The themes around which his mind revolved all his life--nature, God,
the soul--and their endless variations and implications, recur again
and again in each of the ten printed volumes of the Journals. He has
new thoughts on Character, Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners,
Experience, Nature, Immortality, and s