Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration of independence.  It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not yet ended or at present like to be.  A local outbreak, if you will, but so was throwing the tea overboard.  A provincial affair, if the Bohemian press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over the world.

* * * * *

Too much has been made of Emerson’s mysticism.  He was an intellectual rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one.  He never let go the string of his balloon.  He never threw over all his ballast of common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being could breathe.  I found in his library William Law’s edition of Jacob Behmen.  There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader may have grown dizzy,—­just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic asylums,—­evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the contrivers of them.  Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to insanity he knew and has spoken of.  He played with the incommunicable, the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played with a bundle of jack-straws.  “Brahma,” the poem which so mystified the readers of the “Atlantic Monthly,” was one of his spiritual divertisements.  To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out of itself.  If “Rejected Addresses” had not been written half a century before Emerson’s poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant to ridicule and parody it.

       “The song of Braham is an Irish howl;
       Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
  And nought is everything and everything is nought.”

Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended.

Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the “Yoga” doctrine of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse.  The oriental side of Emerson’s nature delighted itself in these narcotic dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish.  They lend a peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them.  The knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible.  It is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human soul had ever constructed.