“The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong.”

His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:—­

“We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine.  I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the Universe:  before the world was, they were.”

It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the “pantheism” which is the object of dread to many of the faithful.  But there are many expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and vaguely to his Christian audience.  “Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold benefit?” It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would feel that they lost by his counsels.

“The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end.”—­“I say to you plainly there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to the nostril.  The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.  Your end should be one inapprehensible to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,—­never touched; always giving health.”

Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson’s calling to supply impulses and not methods.  He was not an organizer, but a power behind many organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their special objects.  The Oration we have been examining was delivered in the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called “Man the Reformer,” and another called “Lecture on the Times.”  In the first he preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that “a man should have a farm, or a mechanical craft for