In regard to books, pictures, statues, collections in natural history, and all such refining objects of nature and art, which heretofore only the opulent could enjoy, Emerson pointed out that in America the public should provide these means of culture and inspiration for every citizen.  He thus anticipated the present ownership by cities, or by endowed trustees, of parks, gardens, and museums of art or science, as well as of baths and orchestras.  Of music in particular he said:  “I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms; could I ... know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,—­that were a bath and a medicine.”  It has been a long road from that sentence, written probably in the forties, to the Symphony Orchestra in this Hall, and to the new singing classes on the East Side of New York City.

For those of us who have attended to the outburst of novels and treatises on humble or squalid life, to the copious discussions on child-study, to the masses of slum literature, and to the numerous writings on home economics, how true to-day seems the following sentence written in 1837:  “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life are the topics of the time.”

* * * * *

I pass now to the last of the three topics which time permits me to discuss,—­Emerson’s religion.  In no field of thought was Emerson more prophetic, more truly a prophet of coming states of human opinion, than in religion.  In the first place, he taught that religion is absolutely natural,—­not supernatural, but natural:—­

  “Out from the heart of Nature rolled
  The burdens of the Bible old.”

He believed that revelation is natural and continuous, and that in all ages prophets are born.  Those souls out of time proclaim truth, which may be momentarily received with reverence, but is nevertheless quickly dragged down into some savage interpretation which by and by a new prophet will purge away.  He believed that man is guided by the same power that guides beast and flower.  “The selfsame power that brought me here brought you,” he says to beautiful Rhodora.  For him worship is the attitude of those “who see that against all appearances the nature of things works for truth and right forever.”  He saw good not only in what we call beauty, grace, and light, but in what we call foul and ugly.  For him a sky-born music sounds “from all that’s fair; from all that’s foul:”—­

  “’Tis not in the high stars alone,
    Nor in the cups of budding flowers,
  Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone,
    Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
  But in the mud and scum of things
  There alway, alway something sings.”

The universe was ever new and fresh in his eyes, not spent, or fallen, or degraded, but eternally tending upward:—­

  “No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
    My oldest force is good as new,
  And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
    Gives back the bending heavens in dew.”