“He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness.”

Consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters they draw.  One must have the mordant in his own personality or he will not take the color of his subject.  He may force himself to picture that which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself.  Let us try Emerson by this test in his “Essay on Milton:”—­

“It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?) of all men, in the power to inspire.  Virtue goes out of him into others.” ...  “He is identified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race.”—­“Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity,—­to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not described nor hero lived.  Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait.  Many philosophers in England, France, and Germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakes.”

Emerson had the same lofty aim as Milton, “To raise the idea of man;” he had “the power to inspire” in a preeminent degree.  If ever a man communicated those vibrations he speaks of as characteristic of Milton, it was Emerson.  In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken.  The similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into their fortunes.  Both were turned away from the clerical office by a revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them in tender and mellifluous threnodies.  It would be easy to trace many parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of audacity.  It is hard to conceive of Emerson as “an expert swordsman” like Milton.  It is impossible to think of him as an abusive controversialist as Milton was in his