love, more
about poetry than about philosophy, more on beauty than on knowledge,
more on walking than on books. There are three times as many
paragraphs on nature (thirty-three) as on the Bible, all of which is
significant of his attitude of mind.

Emerson was a preacher without a creed, a scholar devoted to
super-literary ends, an essayist occupied with thoughts of God, the
soul, nature, the moral law--always the literary artist looking for
the right word, the right image, but always bending his art to the
service of religious thought. He was one of the most religious souls
of his country and time, or of any country and time, yet was disowned
by all the sects and churches of his time. He made religion too
pervasive, and too inclusive to suit them; the stream at once got out
of its banks and inundated all their old landmarks. In the last
analysis of his thought, his ultimate theme was God, and yet he never
allowed himself to attempt any definite statement about God--refusing
always to discuss God in terms of human personality. When Emerson
wrote "Representative Men" he felt that Jesus was the Representative
Man whom he ought to sketch, "but the task required great
gifts--steadiest insight and perfect temper; else the consciousness of
want of sympathy in the audience would make one petulant and sore in
spite of himself."

There are few great men in history or philosophy or literature or
poetry or divinity whose names do not appear more or less frequently
in the Journals. For instance, in the Journal of 1864 the names or
works of one hundred and seventeen men appear, ranging from Zeno to
Jones Very. And this is a fair average. Of course the names of his
friends and contemporaries appear the most frequently. The name that
recurs the most often is that of his friend and neighbor Thoreau.
There are ninety-seven paragraphs in which the Hermit of Walden is the
main or the secondary figure. He discusses him and criticizes him, and
quotes from him, always showing an abiding interest in, and affection
for, him. Thoreau was in so many ways so characteristically Emersonian
that one wonders what influence it was in the place or time that gave
them both, with their disparity of ages, so nearly the same stamp.
Emerson is by far the more imposing figure, the broader, the wiser,
the more tolerant, the more representative; he stood four-square to
the world in a sense that Thoreau did not. Thoreau presented a pretty
thin edge to the wo