its foundation were laid on his first-born, and its terminus were set up over the grave of his youngest child. Emerson, standing on the shore, blesses the steamers that are sweeping past, and cries, "Sweep on to your destination with your freightage of busy thoughts and throbbing purposes, and, as you pass, churn up the waters into poetry;" perched on Monadnoc, he seems to print a path into the cloudland of the future for the rushing railway train, which affects him not with fear, but with hope, for he looks on the machinery of this age as a great scheme of conductors, lying spread and ready for the nobler influences of a coming period. He feels that the real truth is this: railways have not desecrated Nature, but have left man behind, and it were well that man's spiritual should overtake his physical progress. The great lessons of a practical kind which Emerson teaches, or tries to teach his countrymen, are faith, hope, charity, and self-reliance. He does not need to teach them the cheap virtues of industry and attention to their own interest; certain distinctions between meum and tuum, right and wrong, even he has failed to impress upon their apprehension. But he has been unwearied in urging them to faith-in other words, to realize, above the details of life, its intrinsic worth and grandeur as a whole, as well as the presence of divine laws, controlling and animating it all; to hope in the existence of an advance as certain as the motion of the globe (a feeling this which we notice with pleasure to be growing in his writings); to love, as the mother of that milder day which he expects and prophesies; and to self-reliance, as the strong girdle of a nation's, as well as of an individual's loins, without which both are "weak as is a breaking wave."

To a country like America, whose dependence upon Britain too often reminds us of an upstart hanging heavily, yet with an air of insolent carelessness, upon the arm of a superior, of what use might the latter lesson be? "Trust thyself. Cut a strong oaken staff from thy own woods, and rest sturdily, like a woodland giant, upon it. Give over stealing from and then abusing the old country. Kill and eat thine own mutton, instead of living on rotten imported fricassées. Aspire to originality in something else than national faults, insolences, and brutalities. Dare to be true, honest-thyself, indeed, a new country-and the Great Spirit, who loved thee

in thy shaggy primeval mantle, will love thee still, and breathe on thee a breath of his old inspiration." Thus, substantially, in a thousand places, does Emerson preach to his native country.

In judging, whether of his faults or merits, we ought never to lose sight of what is his real position-he was, and is a recluse. He has voluntarily retired from society. Like the knights of old, who left the society of their mistresses to meditate in solitary places upon their charms, he, in love to man, has left him, and muses alone upon his character and destiny. His is not the savage grumbling retreat of a Black Dwarf, nor the Parthian flight of a Byron, nor the forced expulsion of a Shelley, who, seeking to clasp all men to his warm bosom, was with loud outcries repelled, and ran, shrieking, into solitude-it has been a quiet, deliberate, dignified withdrawal. He has said, "If I leave you, I shall, perchance, be better able to continue to love you-and perhaps, too, better able to understand you-and perhaps, above all, better able to profit you." And so the refined philanthropist has gone away to chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, among the blackberry vines or by the "leopard colored rills," or up the long dim vistas of the forest glades. A healthier and happier Cowper, his retreat made, at the time, as little noise as that of the solitary of Olney. London knew not that one, soon to be the greatest poet of that age, and the most powerful satirist of its own vices, was leaving for the country, in the shape of a poor, timid hypochondriac. None cried "stole away" to this wounded hare. So Boston nor New England imagined not that their finest spirit had forsaken his chapel for the cathedral of the woods-and they would have laughed you to scorn had you told them so.

In this capacity of recluse he has conducted himself in a way worthy of the voice which came to him from the heart of the forest, saying, "Come hither and I will show thee a thing." By exercise and stern study he has conquered that tendency to aimless and indolent reverie, which is so apt to assail thinking men in solitude. By the practice of bodily temperance and mental hope, he has, in a great measure, evaded the gloom of vexing thoughts and importunate crav ings. His mind has, "like a melon," expanded in the sun shine.

"The outward forms of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has view'd;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude."

Still we cannot say that he has entirely escaped the drawbacks to which the recluse is subject. He has been living in a world of his own-he has been more conversant with principles than with facts-and more with dreams than either. His writing sometimes wants the edge and point which can be gained only by rough contact with the world; as it is, it is often rather an inarticulate murmur as of a brook, careless whether it be heard or understood or not, than the sharp voice of a living man. Perhaps, also, like most solitaries, he has formed and nursed an exaggerated idea of himself and his mission. In despite to the current of general opinion, he sometimes throws in rugged and crude absurdities, which have come from some other source than of the "Oversoul !" And, altogether, through the mist of the sweet vision, which seems the permanent abode of his own mind, he has but imperfect glimpses of the depth and intensity of that human misery, which is but another name for human life.

There is another subject where, we humbly think, his views are still more egregiously in error. We refer to human guilt. We agree with him in thinking that there is a point of view from which this dark topic may be a theme of gratulation. But we deem him premature and presumptuous in imagining that he has already reached that high angle of vision. If Foster's discolored sight, on the one hand, gave "hell a murkier gloom," and made sin yet uglier than it is, Emerson refines it away to nothing, and really seems to regard the evil committed by man in precisely the same light as the cunning of the serpent and the ferocity of the tiger. Who has anointed his eyes with eye-salve, so that he can look complacently, and with incipient praise on his lips, upon the loathsome shapes of human depravity? What Genius of the western mountains has taken him to an elevation, whence the mass of man's wickedness, communicating with hell, and growing up toward retribution, appears but a molehill, agreeably diversifying the monotony of this world's landscape? The sun may, with his burning lips, kiss and gild pollution, and remain pure; but that human spirit ought

to be supernal which can touch and toy with sin. And if, in his vision of the world, there be barely room for guilt, where is there space left or required for atonement?

It was once remarked by us of John Foster, " pity but he had been a wickeder man" the meaning of which strange expression was this-pity but that, instead of standing at such an austere distance from human frailty, he had come nearer it, and in a larger measure partaken of it himself; for, in this case, his conceptions of it would have been juster, mellower, and less terribly harsh. We may parallel this by saying, pity almost but Emerson had been a worse and an unhappier man; for thus might he have felt more of the evil of depravity, from its remorse and its retribution, and been enabled to counteract that tendency, which evidently exists in his sanguine temperament, to underrate its virulence.

Like every really original mind, Emerson has been frequently subjected to and injured by comparison with others. Because he bears certain general resemblances to others, he must be their imitator or feebler alias. Because he is as tall as one or two reputed giants, he must be of their progeny! He has been called, accordingly, the American Montaignethe American Carlyle-nay, a "Yankee pocket edition of Carlyle." Unfortunate America! It has been so long the land of mocking-birds, that when an eagle of Jove at last appears, he must have imported his scream, and borrowed the wild lustre of his eye! A great original standing up in an imitative country looks so sudden and so strange, that men at first conceive him a forced and foreign production. We will, on the contrary, cling to our belief, that Emerson is himself, and no other; and has learned that piercing yet musical note to which nations are beginning to listen, directly from the fontal source of all melody. We are sure that he would rather be an owl, hooting his own hideous monotone, than the most accomplished of the imitative race of mockingbirds or parrots.

We think that we can observe in many of Emerson's later essays, and in some of his poems, symptoms of deepening obscurity; the twilight of his thought seems rushing down into night. His utterances are becoming vaguer and more elaborately oracular. He is dealing in deliberate puzzles through the breaks in the dark forest of his page

you see his mind in full retreat toward some remoter Cimmerian gloom. That retreat we would arrest if we could, for we are afraid that those who will follow him thither will be few and far between. Since he has gathered a large body of exoteric disciples, it is his duty to seek to instruct, instead of perplexing and bewildering them.

Of Emerson's history we have little to tell. He was one of several brothers-all men of promise and genius-who died early, and whose loss, in one of his little poems, he deplores, as the "strong star-bright companions" of his youth. He officiated for some time as a clergyman in Boston. An American gentleman, who attended his chapel, gave us lately a few particulars about his ministry. Noted for the amiability of his disposition, the strictness of his morals, and attention to his duties, he became, on these accounts, the idol of his congregation. His preaching, however, was not generally popular, nor did it deserve to be. Our informant declared, that while Dr. Channing was the most, Emerson was the least, popular minister in Boston, and confessed that he never heard him preach a first rate sermon till his last, in which he informed his congregation that he could conscientiously preach to them no more. The immediate cause of his resignation was his adoption of some peculiar views of the Lord's Supper. In reality, however, the pulpit was not his pride of place. Its circle not only confined his body, but restricted his soul. He preferred rather to stray to and fro along the crooked serpent of eternity! He went away to think, farm, and write (as the Hutchinsons so sweetly sing) in the "old granite state." Thence, save to lecture, he has seldom issued, till his late pilgrimage to Britain. One trial, he has himself recorded to have shot like lightning through the haze of his mystic tabernacle, and to have pierced his soul to the quick. It was the death of a dear child of rare promise, whose threnody he has sung as none else could. It is the most touching of his strains to us, who have felt how the blotting out of one fair young face (albeit not so nearly related) is for a season the darkening of earth and of heaven.

Since beginning to write, we have had the opportunity of hearing Emerson the lecturer, as well as of meeting Emerson the man, and we shall close by a few jottings on him. Of Emerson the private individual, it were indelicate to say