RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

R.

W. EMERSON was born in Boston, May 25, 1813. He was graduated at Harvard College in 1821, at the age of 17. He taught school several years, then entered the ministry. From 1829 to 1832 he preached in Boston, but on account of a change in his opinions he left the church and ministry and sailed for Europe. After a year's absence he returned home, took up his residence at Concord and entered the lecture field. Although meeting opposition, yet he advanced steadily to the highest point of excellence in his chosen work. He discussed a subject in his lectures until he had fully matured the plan and matter for a book, when he presented the subject to the public in book form.

The following arc Emerson's published volumes: Nature, issued in 1836; two series of Essays, 1841-4; Poems, 1846; Miscellanies, 1849; Representative Men, 1850; English Traits, 1856; The Conduct of Life, 1860; May Day and Other Pieces, 1867; Society and Solitude, 1870. He edited Parnassus in 1875. His peculiar philosophy is set forth in Nature and The American Scholar, an oration published in 1837.

Emerson is not a philosopher solely; he stands rather on the height where poetry and philosophy meet. He never argues and never pursues with strictness a train of thought. He is a disciple of no one master-neither of Plato, Kant, or Comte. He has established no school, intellectual or moral. But with wonderfully sharp perception he has looked into the vast drama of the universe, the mystery of existence, and

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the powers of the soul. With equal acuteness he has observed the manifestations of nature in plants and animals. And in a long lifetime he has mastered and assimilated the wisdom of centuries. His vivid imagination supplies him with figures that are as brilliant and enduring as diamonds. But all he sees is with a poet's eye. The course of empires, the development of the arts, the learning of scholars, the beauty of landscapes, furnish hints to his all-absorbing mind; but the separate ideas never coalesce into a system. His essays are full of golden veins and imbedded gems; a whole dictionary of quotations could be made from them. His poems have the same qualities, and sparkle with aphoristic lines: but his sense of melody or his command of meter is limited, and his verses sometimes have a simple and rustic monotony of cadence, like the oft-repeated plaint of a wild bird.

Beauty.

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful object there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color, or form, or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners, or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of obstruction, and designs to draw a truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of beauty, vis superba forma, which the poets praise--under calm and precise outline, the immeasurable and divine-beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus, and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought. Gross and impure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us the moral sentiments-her locks must appear to us sublime. Thus, there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet