Emerson’s fibre is too fine for large public uses.  He is what he is, and is to be accepted as such, only let us know what he is.  He does not speak to universal conditions, or to human nature in its broadest, deepest, strongest phases.  His thought is far above the great sea level of humanity, where stand most of the world’s masters.  He is like one of those marvelously clear mountain lakes whose water-line runs above all the salt seas of the globe.  He is very precious, taken at his real worth.  Why find fault with the isolation and the remoteness in view of the sky-like purity and depth?

Still I must go on sounding and exploring him, reporting where I touch bottom and where I do not.  He reaps great advantage from his want of sympathy.  The world makes no inroads upon him through this channel.  He is not distracted by the throng or maybe the mob of emotions that find entrance here.  He shines like a star undimmed by current events.  He speaks as from out the interstellar spaces.  ’T is vulgar sympathy makes mortals of us all, and I think Emerson’s poetry finally lacks just that human coloring and tone, that flesh tint of the heart, which vulgar sympathy with human life as such imparts.

But after we have made all possible deductions from Emerson, there remains the fact that he is a living force, and, tried by home standards, a master.  Wherein does the secret of his power lie?  He is the prophet and philosopher of young men.  The old man and the man of the world make little of him, but of the youth who is ripe for him he takes almost an unfair advantage.  One secret of his charm I take to be the instant success with which he transfers our interest in the romantic, the chivalrous, the heroic, to the sphere of morals and the intellect.  We are let into another realm unlooked for, where daring and imagination also lead.  The secret and suppressed heart finds a champion.  To the young man fed upon the penny precepts and staple Johnsonianism of English literature, and upon what is generally doled out in the schools and colleges, it is a surprise; it is a revelation.  A new world opens before him.  The nebulae of his spirit are resolved or shown to be irresolvable.  The fixed stars of his inner firmament are brought immeasurably near.  He drops all other books.  He will gaze and wonder.  From Locke or Johnson or Wayland to Emerson is like a change from the school history to the Arabian Nights.  There may be extravagances and some jugglery, but for all that the lesson is a genuine one, and to us of this generation immense.

Emerson is the knight-errant of the moral sentiment.  He leads, in our time and country, one illustrious division, at least, in the holy crusade of the affections and the intuitions against the usurpations of tradition and theological dogma.  He marks the flower, the culmination, under American conditions and in the finer air of the New World, of the reaction begun by the German philosophers, and passed along by later French