“Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a task-master.  High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!”

“Compensation” might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be praised for his performance.  Emerson had been listening to a sermon from a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful, and the good are miserable.  This last proposition agrees with John Bunyan’s view:—­

  “A Christian man is never long at ease,
  When one fright’s gone, another doth him seize.”

Emerson shows up the “success” of the bad man and the failures and trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble scorn of the preacher’s low standard of happiness and misery, which would have made him throw his sermon into the fire.

The Essay on “Spiritual Laws” is full of pithy sayings:—­

“As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands.  All the devils respect virtue.—­A man passes for that he is worth.—­The ancestor of every action is a thought.—­To think is to act.—­Let a man believe in God, and not in names and places and persons.  Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature.”

This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud of George Herbert’s.  The Essay on “Love” is poetical, but the three poems, “Initial,” “Daemonic,” and “Celestial Love” are more nearly equal to his subject than his prose.

There is a passage in the Lecture on “Friendship” which suggests some personal relation of Emerson’s about which we cannot help being inquisitive:—­

“It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other.  Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious?  It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet.  Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion....  Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation.  The essence of friendship is entireness, a total