If our learned and excellent John Cotton used to sweeten his mouth before going to bed with a bit of Calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from Emerson’s Essay on “Resources":—­

“A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism,—­teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,—­all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious.  But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives; if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has experimented on things,—­I am invigorated, put into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and gratitude to the Cause of Causes.”

The Essay or Lecture on “The Comic” may have formed a part of a series he had contemplated on the intellectual processes.  Two or three sayings in it will show his view sufficiently:—­

“The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance.

“If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be affected by the exposure.  We have no deeper interest than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke of any lie we entertain.  Besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure.  It appears to be an essential element in a fine character.—­A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible.  If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.”

These and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very recent date.

“Quotation and Originality” furnishes the key to Emerson’s workshop.  He believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book.  Not in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and superscription.

“All minds quote.  Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.  There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.—­We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.—­

    “The borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and
    stoutness.  A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his
    invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.