or
safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

Although Emerson broke away from all religious forms, yet was there
something back of them that he always respected, as do we all. He
relates that one night at a hotel a stranger intruded into his chamber
after midnight, claiming a share in it. "But after his lamp had smoked
the chamber full, and I had turned round to the wall in despair, the
man blew out his lamp, knelt down at his bedside, and made in low
whispers a long earnest prayer. Then was the relation entirely changed
between us. I fretted no more, but respected and liked him."

Contrasting his own case with that of so many young men who owed their
religious training exclusively to Cambridge and other public
institutions, he says: "How much happier was my star which rained on
me influence of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious
sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and
derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly
lives and godly deeds of sainted kindred of Concord, Maiden, York, was
itself a culture, an education."

XII

A course of ten lectures which he delivered in Boston in February,
1840, on the "Present Age" gave him little pleasure. He could not warm
up, get agitated, and so warm and agitate others: "A cold mechanical
preparation for a delivery as decorous,--fine things, pretty things,
wise things,--but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, no
transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment." Because he lacked
constitutional vigor, he could expend only, say, twenty-one hours on
each lecture, if he would be able and ready for the next. If he could
only rally the lights and mights of sixty hours into twenty, he said,
he should hate himself less. Self-criticism was a notable trait with
him. Of self-praise he was never guilty. His critics and enemies
rarely said severer things of him than he said of himself. He was
almost morbidly conscious of his own defects, both as a man and as a
writer. There are many pages of self-criticism in the Journals, but
not one of self-praise. In 1842 he writes: "I have not yet adjusted my
relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too
young, or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?"
Later he sighs, "If only I could be set aglow!" He had wished for a
professorship, or for a pulpit, much as he reacted from the
church--something to give him the stimulus of a stated task.