There was another element in Emerson, curiously combined with transcendentalism, namely, his love and respect for Nature.  Nature, for the transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing his own verses), “What a genius I am!  Who would have thought there was such stuff in me?” And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine a ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually has.  No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since I made it.  And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be, undoubtedly sharpens the vision of a poet and a moralist to all that is inspiriting and symbolic in the natural world.  Emerson was particularly ingenious and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses of fellowship with the elements.  This is something in which all Teutonic poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine and spontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of American taste.  Just as some people are naturally enthralled and refreshed by music, so others are by landscape.  Music and landscape make up the spiritual resources of those who cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled ideals in words.  Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for instance), are the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but when a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by that; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself openly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts, where human circumstances are lost sight of, and human problems dissolve in a purer medium.  The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its quietus being found in intelligence.  To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.  In the presence of music or landscape human experience eludes itself; and thus romanticism is the bond between transcendental and naturalistic sentiment.  The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.  Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind its back?  This might well not have occurred as yet; but America is so precocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise for its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and poetry are already to be found.  I might mention the humorists, of whom you here in California have had your share.  The humorists, however, only half escape the genteel tradition; their humour would lose its savour if they had wholly escaped it.  They point to what contradicts it in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition, for they have nothing solid to put in its place.  When they point out how ill many facts fit into it, they do not clearly conceive that this militates against the standard, but think it a funny