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 controversy with Salmasius.  But though Emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have been conscious, like Milton, of “a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness,” which was as a shield about his inner nature.  Charles Emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the feeling in his college essay on Friendship, where it is all summed up in the line he quotes:—­

  “The hand of Douglas is his own.”

It must be that in writing this Essay on Milton Emerson felt that he was listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that of the divine singer.

* * * * *

My friend, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, a life-long friend of Emerson, who understood him from the first, and was himself a great part in the movement of which Emerson, more than any other man, was the leader, has kindly allowed me to make use of the following letters:—­

    TO REV.  JAMES F. CLARKE, LOUISVILLE, KY.

    PLYMOUTH, MASS., March 12, 1834.