t it would not change the character of
Monadnoc. He knew that the past and the present, the near and the far,
were made of one stuff. He united the courage of science with the
sensibility of poetry. He would not be defrauded of the value of the
present hour, or of the thoughts which he and other men think, or of
the lives which they live to-day. "I will tell you how you can enrich
me--if you will recommend to-day to me." His doctrine of
self-reliance, which he preached in season and out of season, was
based upon the conviction that Nature and the soul do not become old
and outworn, that the great characters and great thoughts of the past
were the achievements of men who trusted themselves before custom or
law. The sun shines to-day; the constellations hang there in the
heavens the same as of old. God is as near us as ever He was--why
should we take our revelations at second hand? No other writer who has
used the English language has ever preached such a heroic doctrine of
self-trust, or set the present moment so high in the circle of the
years, in the diadem of the days.

It is an old charge against Emerson that he was deficient in human
sympathy. He makes it against himself; the ties of association which
most persons find so binding seemed to hold him very lightly. There
was always a previous question with him--the moral value of one's
associations. Unless you sicken and die to some purpose, why such an
ado about it? Unless the old ruin of a house harbored great men and
great women, or was the scene of heroic deeds, why linger around it?
The purely human did not appeal to him; history interested him only as
it threw light upon to-day. History is a record of the universal mind;
hence of your mind, of my mind--"all the facts of history preexist in
the mind as laws." "What Plato thought, every man may think. What a
saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he
can understand." "All that Shakespear says of the king, yonder slip of
a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself"; and so
on, seeing in history only biography, and interested in the past only
as he can link it with the present. Always an intellectual interest,
never a human or an emotional one. His Journal does not reveal him
going back to the old places, or lingering fondly over the memories of
his youth. He speaks of his "unpleasing boyhood," of his unhappy
recollections, etc., not because of unkindness or hardships
exper