t reaches its true law of
action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. Away
with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of
single men spoken on their honor and their conscience."

This extract from The Conduct of Life gives fairly enough the leading
thought of Emerson's life. The unending warfare between the individual
and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a
musician who exalts and deifies the individual, and leads us back again
to the only object which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which can
permanently excite it,--the character of a man. It is surprising to find
this identity of content in all great deliverances. The only thing we
really admire is personal liberty. Those who fought for it and those who
enjoyed it are our heroes.

But the hero may enslave his race by bringing in a system of tyranny;
the battle-cry of freedom may become a dogma which crushes the soul; one
good custom may corrupt the world. And so the inspiration of one age
becomes the damnation of the next. This crystallizing of life into death
has occurred so often that it may almost be regarded as one of the laws
of progress.

Emerson represents a protest against the tyranny of democracy. He is the
most recent example of elemental hero-worship. His opinions are
absolutely unqualified except by his temperament. He expresses a form of
belief in the importance of the individual which is independent of any
personal relations he has with the world. It is as if a man had been
withdrawn from the earth and dedicated to condensing and embodying this
eternal idea--the value of the individual soul--so vividly, so vitally,
that his words could not die, yet in such illusive and abstract forms
that by no chance and by no power could his creed be used for purposes
of tyranny. Dogma cannot be extracted from it. Schools cannot be built
on it. It either lives as the spirit lives, or else it evaporates and
leaves nothing. Emerson was so afraid of the letter that killeth that he
would hardly trust his words to print. He was assured there was no such
thing as literal truth, but only literal falsehood. He therefore
resorted to metaphors which could by no chance be taken literally. And
he has probably succeeded in leaving a body of work which cannot be made
to operate to any other end than that for which he designed it. If this
be true, he has accomplished the inconceivable feat of eluding
misc