ces
at the crushing of the shell of foppish indolence, the heralded downfall
of the petty vanities, sprung, Heaven knows with what reason, from the
loins of Norman robbers, of Huguenot refugees, of Puritans beggared and
ignorant, and centered in some wide-spreading genealogical tree, that a
whole family unite to cultivate into a banyan that may embrace the whole
little world of their satellites with inflexible ligatures. Thus 'the
doctrine of the snake' is to go out, and good men see that the sinews of
society are to be strengthened.

It is worth while to observe, in that first chapter on Fate, how
admirably Emerson provides for the exercise of a free activity in every
man. 'Every spirit makes its house, but afterward the house confines the
spirit.' This leaves no room for the coward, who declines to work out
his salvation, even with fear and trembling. It summons all men to clear
away the brush and dry leaves of a perverted fatalism,

'To make the absolute best of what God made,'

to sharpen every faculty, expand every capacity, and bow only to the
Eternal.

AEterna aeternus tribuit, mortalia confert
Mortalis; divina Deus, peritura caducus.'

Here is the choice, eternal or mortal, divine or perishable. This drives
men to seek their Paradise in Culture. Well, they find in it a Beulah,
and beyond rolls the Jordan of the soul. Men have made a dwarfed
Providence to suit their dwarfed aims, an amorphous Deity, whose
attributes are imperfect, disproportioned. But yesterday I heard a
Frenchman, who has no acquaintance with our literature and never heard
of Emerson, say, 'God, with the multitude, is no more than a feeble old
man, whose whims and whose age we must respect. What is to become of his
high claims upon creatures who are to work out an infinite purpose? _Il
faut honorer la vieillesse?_ Emerson had anticipated this with his
'pistareen Providence, dressed in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of
a student of divinity;' yet it proves that minds are arriving by widely
diverging paths at the same truths.

There is nothing ideal or vague in the vigorous efforts he makes in this
volume to rise to political economy and to set forth the practical
action of capital and industry on life. He says no longer, 'To me
commerce is of trivial import,' but endorses Henry Carey's theory of
wealth, and acknowledges unreservedly, in its broadest sense, the
universal domination of Law. Statistics bourgeon into prophecies unde