turn.  Here comes out around me at this moment the new June,—­the leaves say June, though the calendar says May,—­and we must needs hail our young relatives again, though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters receiving a late-born brother or sister.  Nature herself seems a little ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game again without a new bract or sepal.  But you will think me incorrigible with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this summer; perhaps with A.W. and the other travellers.  My children scan curiously your E.’s drawings, as they have seen them.

The happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours!

R.W.  EMERSON.

In the year 1860, Theodore Parker died, and Emerson spoke of his life and labors at the meeting held at the Music Hall to do honor to his memory.  Emerson delivered discourses on Sundays and week-days in the Music Hall to Mr. Parker’s society after his death.  In 1862, he lost his friend Thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was published in the “Atlantic Monthly” for August of the same year.  Thoreau had many rare and admirable qualities, and Thoreau pictured by Emerson is a more living personage than White of Selborne would have been on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

The Address on the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in Boston in September, 1862.  The feeling that inspired it may be judged by the following extract:—­

“Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them an honest career.  Happy the old, who see Nature purified before they depart.  Do not let the dying die; hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the melioration of our planet:—­

  “’Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
  And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.’”

The “Conduct of Life” was published in 1860.  The chapter on “Fate” might leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe.  But let him hold fast to this reassuring statement:—­

“If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.—­We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times.”

But the value of the Essay is not so much in any light it throws on the mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are illustrated.