He feels that every enigma runs into the great enigmawhat is man? and that if he could but unlock his own heart, the key of the universe were found. Perhaps nature, in some benignant or unguarded hour, will tell him where that key was lost! At all events, he will persist in believing that the creation is a vast symbol of man; that every tree and blade of grass is somehow cognate with his nature, and significant of his destiny; and that the remotest stars are only the distant perspective of that picture of which he is the central figure.

It is this which so beautifies nature to his eye-that gives him more than an organic or associated pleasure in its forms, and renders it to him, not so much an object of love or of admiration as of ardent study. To many nature is but the face of a great doll-a well-painted insipidity; to Emerson it has sculptured on it an unknown but mighty language, which he hopes yet to decipher. Could he but understand its alphabet!-could he but accurately spell out one of its glorious syllables! In the light of that flashing syllable he would appear to himself discovered, explained; and thus, once for all, would be read the riddle of the world!

This, too, prevents his intercourse with nature from becoming either tedious or melancholy. Nature, to most, is a gloomy companion. Sometimes they are tired of it-more frequently they are terrified. "What does all this mean? what would all this teach us? what would those frowning schoolmasters of mountains have us to do or learn?" are questions which, though not presented in form, are felt in reality, and which clear, as by a whip of small cords, the desecrated temple of nature. A few, indeed, are still left standing in the midst alone! And among those few is Emerson, who is reconciled to remain, chiefly through the hope and the desire of attaining one day more perfect knowledge of nature's silent cipher, and more entire communion with nature's secret soul. Like an enthusiastic boy clasping a Homer's "Iliad," and saying, "I shall yet be able to understand this," does he seem to say, Dear are ye to me, Monadnoc and Agiochook, dear ye Alleghanies and Niagaras, because I yet hope (or at least those may hope who are to follow me) to unfix your clasps of iron-to unroll your sheets

of adamant to deliver the giant truths that are buried and struggling below you to arrest in human speech the ac cents of your vague and tumultuous thunder."

As it is, his converse with creation is intimate and endearing. "Passing over a bare common, amid snow-puddles, he almost fears to say how glad he is." He seems (particularly in his "Woodnotes") an inspired tree, his veins full of sap instead of blood; and you take up his volume of poems, clad as it is in green, and smell to it as to a fresh leaf. He is like the shepherd (in Johnson's fine fable) among the Carpathian rocks, who understood the language of the vultures; the sounds-how manifold-of the American forest say to his purged ear what they say to few others, and what even his language is unable fully to express.

Akin to this passionate love of nature is one main error in Emerson's system. Because nature consoles and satisfies him, he would preach it as a healing influence of universal efficacy. He would send man to the fields and woods to learn instruction and get cured of his many wounds. These are the airy academies which he recommends. But, alas! how few can act upon the recommendation! How few entertain a genuine love for nature! Man, through his unhappy wanderings, has been separated, nay, divorced, from what was originally his pure and beautiful bride-the universe. No one feels this more than Emerson, or has mourned it in language more plaintive. But why will he persist in prescribing nature as a panacea to those who, by his own showing, are incapable of apprehending its virtue? They are clamoring for bread, and he would give them rocks and ruins. We hold that between man and nature there is a gulf, which nothing but a vital change upon his character, circumstances, and habits can fill up. Ere applying the medicine, you must surely premise the stomach. Man, as a collective being, has little perception of the beauty, and none of the high spiritual meaning of creation; and as well teach the blind religion through the avenue of the eye, as teach average man truth or hope, or faith or purity, through a nature amid which he dwells an alien and an enemy.

On no subject is there so much pretended, and on none so little real feeling, as in reference to the beauties of nature. We do not allude merely to the trash which professed

authors, like even Dickens, indite, when, against the grain, it is their cue to fall into raptures with Niagara, or the scenery of the Eternal City, but to the experiences of everyday life. How often have we travelled with parties of pleasure (as they are called) whose faces, after the first burst of animal excitement, produced by fresh air and society, had subsided, it was impossible to contemplate without a mixture of ludicrous and melancholy emotions. Besides, here and there, a young gentleman with elevated eyebrow and conceited side-look, spouting poetry; and a few young ladies looking intensely sentimental during the spoutation, the majority exhibited, so far as pleasure was concerned, an absolute blank -weariness, disgust, insipid disregard, or positive aversion, to all the grander features of the scenery, were the general feelings visible. Still more detestable were their occasional exclamations of forced admiration, nearly as eloquent, but not so sincere, as the enthusiasm of porkers over their provender. And how quickly did a starveling jest or a wretched pun jerk them down from their altitudes to a more congenial region! A double entendre told better than the sight of a biforked Grampian. The poppling of a cork was finer music than the roar of a cataract. A silly flirtation among the hazel-bushes was far more memorable than the sudden gleam of a blue lake flashing through the umbrage like another morning. And when the day was over, and the party were returning homewards, it was dismal amid the deepening shadows of earth and the thickening glories of the sky, to witness the jaded looks, the exhausted spirits, the emptied hearts and souls of those vain flutterers about nature, whom the mighty mother had amused herself with tiring and tormenting, instead of unbarring to them her naked loveliness, or hinting to them one of the smallest secrets of her inmost soul. Specimens these of myriads upon myriads of parties of pleasure, which fashion is yearly stranding upon the shores of nature-to them an inhospitable coast and proofs that man, as a species, must grow, and perhaps grow for ages, ere he be fit, even "on tiptoe standing," to be on a level with that "house not made with hands," of which he is now the unworthy tenant. Surely the beauties of nature are an appliance too refined for the present coarse complaints of degraded humanity, which a fiercer caustic must euro.

Emerson may be denominated emphatically the man of contrasts. At times he is, we have seen, the most commonplace, at other times the most paradoxical of thinkers. So is he at once one of the clearest and one of the most obscure of writers. He is seldom muddy; but either transparent as crystal or utterly opaque. He sprinkles sentences (as divines do Scripture quotations) upon his page, which are not only clear, but cast, like glow-worms, a far and fairy light around them. At other times he scatters a shower of paragraphs, which lie, like elf-knots, insulated and insoluble. Hence reading him has the stimulus of a walk amid the interchanging lights and shadows of the woods, or it is like a game of hide-and-seek, or you feel somewhat like the unlearned reader of Howe and Baxter when he comes upon their Latin and Greek quotations. You skip or bolt his bits of mysticism, and pass on with greater gusto to the clear and the open. Whether there

be degrees in biblical inspiration or not, there are degrees in his. Now he rays out light, and now, like a black star, he deluges us with darkness. The explanation of all this lies, we think, here-Emerson has naturally a poetic and practical, not a philosophic or subtle mind; he has subjected himself, however, to philosophic culture, with much care, but with partial success; when he speaks directly from his own mind, his utterances are vivid to very brilliance; when he speaks from recollection of his teachers, they are exceedingly perplexed and obscure.

He is certainly, apart altogether from his verse, the truest poet America has produced. He has looked immediately, and through no foreign medium, at the poetical elements which he found lying around him. He has "staid at home with the soul," leaving others to gad abroad in search of an artificial and imperfect inspiration. He has said, "If the spirit of poetry chooses to descend upon me as I stand still, it is well; if not, I will not go a step out of my road in search of it; here, on this rugged soil of Massachusetts. I take my stand, baring my brow in the breeze of my own country, and invoking the genius of my own words." Nor has he invoked it in vain. Words, which are pictures -sounds, which are song-snatches of a deep woodland melody-jubilant raptures in praise of nature, reminding

you afar off of those old Hebrew hymns, which, paired to the timbrel or the clash of cymbals, rose like the cries of som great victory to heaven-are given to Emerson at his pleasure. His prose is not upon occasion, and elaborately dyed with poetic hues, but wears them ever about it on its way, which is a winged way. not along the earth. but through the high and liquid air. Why should a man like this write verse? Does he think that truth, like sheep, requires a bell round its neck, ere it be permitted to go abroad? Have his thoughts risen irresistibly above the reaches of prose, and voluntarily moved into harmonious numbers? Does he mean to abandon-or could he, without remorse-that wondrous prose style of his, combining the sweet simplicity of Addison with the force of Carlyle? Is he impatient to have his verses set to music, and sung in the streets or in the drawing-rooms? Let him be assured that, exquisite as many of his poems are, his other writings are a truer and richer voice, their short and mellow sentences moving to the breath of his spirit as musically as the pine-cones to the breeze.

When we take into account this author's poetic tendencies and idealistic training, we are astonished that he should be often the most practical of moralists. And yet so it is. His refined theories frequently bend down like rainbows, and rest their bases on earth. He often seeks to translate transcendental truth into life and action. Himself may be standing still, but it is as a cannon stands still; his words are careering over the world, calling on men to be fervent in spirit, as well as diligent in business. There is something at times almost laughable in the sight of this man living "collaterally or aside "this quiet. wrapt mystic standing with folded arms, like a second Simon Stylites, and yet preaching motion, progress-fervent motion, perpetual kindling progress to all around him. Motionless as a finger-post, he, like it, shows the way onwards to all passers-by. He is, in this respect, very unlike Wordsworth, who would protect the quiet of his fields as carefully as that of his family vault, or as the peace of his own heart; who, in love for calm, would almost prefer the pacing of the silent streets of a city of the plague to the most crowded thoroughfares of London, and who hates each railway as if, to use the Scripture allusion,