and distinction, and never an eye so keen for their
discovery. His optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate
hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us
familiar. For Emerson, the individual fact and moment were indeed
suffused with absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that saved
the situation--they must be worthy specimens,--sincere, authentic,
archetypal; they must have made connection with what he calls the Moral
Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the
Universe's meaning. To know just which thing does act in this way, and
which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat
incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we
must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson
himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the
individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might
easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against
our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his
own time. He might have called him, as a private person, a tedious
bore and canter. But he would infallibly have added what he then
added: "It is strange and horrible to say this, for I feel that under
him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and the sea, and
all that in them is, and the axis round which the Universe revolves
passes through his body where he stands."

Be it how it may, then, this is Emerson's revelation:--The point of any
pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person's act, if
genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity. This vision is the
head-spring of all his outpourings; and it is for this truth, given to
no previous literary artist to express in such penetratingly persuasive
tones, that posterity will reckon him a prophet, and, perhaps
neglecting other pages, piously turn to those that convey this message.
His life was one long conversation with the invisible divine,
expressing itself through individuals and particulars:--"So nigh is
grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man!"

I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the echo, of men is after
they are departed? Emerson's wraith comes to me now as if it were but
the very voice of this victorious argument. His words to this effect
are certain to be quoted and extracted more and more as time goes on,
and to take their place among the Scriptures of hum