The poet finds his materials everywhere, as Emerson tells him in this eloquent apostrophe:—­

“Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird!  Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should’st walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.”

“Experience” is, as he says himself, but a fragment.  It bears marks of having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other essays.  His most important confession is this:—­

“All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having.  I would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal.”

The Essay on “Character” requires no difficult study, but is well worth the trouble of reading.  A few sentences from it show the prevailing tone and doctrine.

“Character is Nature in the highest form.  It is of no use to ape it, or to contend with it.  Somewhat is possible of resistance and of persistence and of creation to this power, which will foil all emulation.”

“There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they have been unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem to be an accumulation of that power we consider.

“The history of those gods and saints which the world has written, and then worshipped, are documents of character.  The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind.  This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact.”

In his Essay on “Manners,” Emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman:—­

“The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions.  Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence:  manhood first, and then gentleness.—­Power first, or no leading class.—­God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door:  but whenever used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy.—­The famous gentlemen of Europe have been of this strong