anly and heroic note. He
is an unconquerable optimist, and says boldly, "Nothing but God can
root out God," and he thinks that in time our culture will absorb the
hells also. He counts "the dear old Devil" among the good things which
the dear old world holds for him. He saw so clearly how good comes out
of evil and is in the end always triumphant. Were he living in our
day, he would doubtless find something helpful and encouraging to say
about the terrific outburst of scientific barbarism in Europe.

It is always stimulating to hear a man ask such a question as this,
even though he essay no answer to it: "Is the world (according to the
old doubt) to be criticized otherwise than as the best possible in the
existing system, and the population of the world the best that soils,
climate, and animals permit?"

I note that in 1837 Emerson wrote this about the Germans; "I do not draw
from them great influence. The heroic, the holy, I lack. They are
contemptuous. They fail in sympathy with humanity. The voice of nature
they bring me to hear is not divine, but ghastly, hard, and ironical.
They do not illuminate me: they do not edify me." Is not this the German
of to-day? If Emerson were with us now he would see, as we all see, how
the age of idealism and spiritual power in Germany that gave the world
the great composers and the great poets and philosophers--Bach,
Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, and
others--has passed and been succeeded by the hard, cruel, and sterile
age of materialism, and the domination of an aggressive and
conscienceless military spirit. Emerson was the poet and prophet of
man's moral nature, and it is this nature--our finest and highest human
sensibilities and aspirations toward justice and truth--that has been so
raided and trampled upon by the chief malefactor and world outlaw in the
present war.

II

Men who write Journals are usually men of certain marked traits--they
are idealists, they love solitude rather than society, they are
self-conscious, and they love to write. At least this seems to be true
of the men of the past century who left Journals of permanent literary
worth--Amiel, Emerson, and Thoreau. Amiel's Journal has more the
character of a diary than has Emerson's or Thoreau's, though it is
also a record of thoughts as well as of days. Emerson left more
unprinted matter than he chose to publish during his lifetime.

The Journals of Emerson and Thoreau are largely