however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an
interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of
provincialism; it was a beginning without a fruition, a dawn without a
noon; and it produced, with a single exception, no great talents. It
produced a great deal of writing, but (always putting Hawthorne aside,
as a contemporary but not a sharer) only one writer in whom the world
at large has interested itself. The situation was summed up and
transfigured in the admirable and exquisite Emerson. He expressed all
that it contained, and a good deal more, doubtless, besides; he was
the man of genius of the moment; he was the Transcendentalist _par
excellence_. Emerson expressed, before all things, as was extremely
natural at the hour and in the place, the value and importance of the
individual, the duty of making the most of one's self, of living by
one's own personal light and carrying out one's own disposition. He
reflected with beautiful irony upon the exquisite impudence of those
institutions which claim to have appropriated the truth and to dole it
out, in proportionate morsels, in exchange for a subscription. He
talked about the beauty and dignity of life, and about every one who
is born into the world being born to the whole, having an interest and
a stake in the whole. He said "all that is clearly due to-day is not
to lie," and a great many other things which it would be still easier
to present in a ridiculous light. He insisted upon sincerity and
independence and spontaneity, upon acting in harmony with one's
nature, and not conforming and compromising for the sake of being more
comfortable. He urged that a man should await his call, his finding
the thing to do which he should really believe in doing, and not be
urged by the world's opinion to do simply the world's work. "If no
call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want
of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence.... If I
cannot work, at least I need not lie." The doctrine of the supremacy