and English thinkers, of man against circumstance, of spirit against form, of the present against the past.  What splendid affirmation, what inspiring audacity, what glorious egoism, what generous brag, what sacred impiety!  There is an eclat about his words, and a brave challenging of immense odds, that is like an army with banners.  It stirs the blood like a bugle-call:  beauty, bravery, and a sacred cause,—­the three things that win with us always.  The first essay is a forlorn hope.  See what the chances are:  “The world exists for the education of each man. . . .  He should see that he can live all history in his own person.  He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and, if England or Egypt have anything to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them forever be silent.”  In every essay that follows, there are the same great odds and the same electric call to the youth to face them.  It is, indeed, as much a world of fable and romance that Emerson introduces us to as we get in Homer or Herodotus.  It is true, all true,—­true as Arthur and his knights, or Pilgrim’s Progress, and I pity the man who has not tasted its intoxication, or who can see nothing in it.

The intuitions are the bright band, without armor or shield, that slay the mailed and bucklered giants of the understanding.  Government, institutions, religions, fall before the glance of the hero’s eye.  Art and literature, Shakespeare, Angelo, Aeschylus, are humble suppliants before you, the king.  The commonest fact is idealized, and the whole relation of man to the universe is thrown into a kind of gigantic perspective.  It is not much to say there is exaggeration; the very start makes Mohammed’s attitude toward the mountain tame.  The mountain shall come to Mohammed, and, in the eyes of all born readers of Emerson, the mountain does come, and comes with alacrity.

Some shrewd judges apprehend that Emerson is not going to last; basing their opinion upon the fact, already alluded to, that we outgrow him, or pass through him as through an experience that we cannot repeat.  He is but a bridge to other things; he gets you over.  He is an exceptional fact in literature, say they, and does not represent lasting or universal conditions.  He is too fine for the rough wear and tear of ages.  True, we do not outgrow Dante, or Cervantes, or Bacon; and I doubt if the Anglo-Saxon stock at least ever outgrows that king of romancers, Walter Scott.  These men and their like appeal to a larger audience, and in some respects a more adult one, at least one more likely to be found in every age and people.  Their achievement was more from the common level of human nature than are Emerson’s astonishing