pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north,"-how easy to lay the book down and read no more that day; but a moment's patience is amply rewarded, for but sixteen lines farther on we may read as follows: "We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove, or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment Day,-if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it; or at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution or of murder! If I quake, what matters it what I quake at?" Well and truly did Carlyle write to Emerson, "You are a new era, my man, in your huge country.

Emerson's poetry has at least one of the qualities of true poetry-it always pleases and occasionally delights. Great poetry it may not be, but it has the happy knack of slipping in between our fancies, and of clinging like ivy to the masonry of the thought-structure beneath which each one of us has his dwelling. I must be allowed room for two quotations, one from the stanzas called Give all to Love, the other from Wood-Notes.

Cling with life to the maid;

But when the surprise,

First vague shadow of surmise,

Flits across her bosom young

Of a joy apart from thee,

Free be she, fancy-free,

Nor thou detain her vesture's hem,

Nor the palest rose she flung

From her summer diadem.
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,

Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.

The lines from Wood-Notes run as follows:

Come learn with me the fatal song

Which knits the world in music strong,
Whereto every bosom dances,

Kindled with courageous fancies;

Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes

Of things with things, of times with times,
Primal chimes of sun and shade,

Of sound and echo, man and maid;
The land reflected in the flood;
Body with shadow still pursued.
For nature beats in perfect tune

And rounds with rhyme her every rune;
Whether she work in land or sea

Or hide underground her alchemy,

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,

Or dip thy paddle in the lake,

But it carves the bow of beauty there,

And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
Not unrelated, unaffied,

But to each thought and thing allied,
Is perfect nature's every part,
Rooted in the mighty heart.

Some

What place Emerson is to occupy in American literature is for America to determine. authoritative remarks on this subject are to be found in Mr. Lowell's essay on "Thoreau," in My Study Windows; but here at home, where we are sorely pressed for room, it is certain he must be content with a small allotment, where, however, he may for ever sit beneath his own vine and figtree, none daring to make him afraid. Emerson will always be the favourite author of somebody; and to be always read by somebody is better than

to be read first by everybody and then by nobody. Indeed, it is hard to fancy a pleasanter destiny than to join the company of lesser authors. All their readers are sworn friends. They are spared the harsh discords of ill-judged praise and feigned rapture. Once or twice in a century some enthusiastic and expansive admirer insists upon dragging them from their shy retreats, and trumpeting their fame in the market-place, asserting, possibly with loud asseverations (after the fashion of Mr. Swinburne), that they are precisely as much above Otway and Collins and George Eliot as they are below Shakespeare and Hugo and Emily Brontë. The great world looks on good-humouredly for a moment or two, and then proceeds as before, and the disconcerted author is left free to scuttle back to his corner, where he is all the happier, sharing the raptures of the lonely student, for his brief experience of publicity.

Let us bid farewell to Emerson (who has bidden farewell to the world) in the words of his own Good-bye.

Good-bye to flattery's fawning face,
To grandeur with his wise grimace,
To upstart wealth's averted eye,
To supple office low and high,

To crowded halls, to court and street,

To frozen hearts and hasting feet,

To those who go and those who come,-
Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home.
I am going to my own hearth-stone
Bosomed in yon green hills, alone,
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbird's roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod,

A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

T

EMERSON1

1903

HE chronological fact that Emerson was born in Boston, Mass., on the 25th of May,

1803, a hundred years ago, does not make my task to-night any the easier. Few men of the modern world have been written about more than he, or by a greater variety of persons. Austere critics, and wild ones; sober-minded folk, mindful of all the traditions, and the veriest outlaws of thought, the Ishmaels of literature, have alike made Emerson the subject of their remarks. But Emerson has not only been written about, he has been read, and read zealously, in a serious spirit, in the study, in the pulpit, in college-rooms, in poor men's dwellings and in the open field. He has had those perilous belongings, that often damaging entourage -disciples. An American, writing in the Emerson Centenary number of the Critic, with the courage of his race, has hazarded the observation that if all the fools, the "different kinds of fools, that have been helplessly made by Emerson and by Whitman could be gotten together en masse, lined up and opposed to one another, and looked over, Emerson's lot of fools would be more creditable to him than Whitman's." There is something almost stupendous in this mode of estimating

'An address delivered before the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, London, on June 2nd, 1903, and now published with the permission of the Association

disciplehood. Trembling I pass it by, merely quoting it to help us to realise for one dim moment to-night how vast is the range of Emerson's influence, and how impossible it would be to number his tribe.

Remembering as I do, and as you do, what has been written about Emerson by such men as Lowell and Holmes on his own side of the water; and by Arnold and by John Morley on this side; remembering also that marvellous correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle in which each describes the other in a series of felicitous strokes; and knowing that I am addressing those whose acquaintance with Emerson's way of thinking and modes of expression is at least as great as my own, I do not propose to retell a familiar tale or to tease you by any tiresome comments of mine on those slender, much-loved volumes, some of you know better than you do your Bibles.

I invite your attention, first to the nature of the man himself, and his genesis in Boston, and then to his dominant ideas.

One thing must be conceded to me at the outset, and it adds to the interest of the theme. Whatever anyone may now think of Emerson, whether he is to remain for long years to come, as Froude thought Carlyle was to do, a light in the sky, or is destined to fade away as do the colours of the sunset, he was once upon a time, and for a long time, a veritable sign in the heavens-a subtle influence, a something that made all the difference to many a mind. Criticise Emerson as you may, even harshly if it suits your humour (and he lends himself to criticism), predict his decline and fall in a