emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the immediacy of the soul's
access to God. It has been the burden of a thousand prophets in
all religions. The young priests of the Divinity School, their
eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed
Emerson's injunction to turn away from past records and
historical authorities and to drink from the living fountain of
the divine within themselves; but to the professors, "the stern
old war-gods," this relative belittlement of historical
Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation passed before Emerson
was again welcomed by his alma mater.

The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord
Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson.
He was a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind
forbade formal, consecutive, logical thought. He was not a
philosopher in the accepted sense, though he was always
philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite of his curious
searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in books as
he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him; he
"fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe.
He basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the
pages of his private "Journal," which he called his savings-bank,
because from this source he drew most of the material for his
books. The "Journal" has recently been printed, in ten volumes.
No American writing rewards the reader more richly. It must be
remembered that Emerson's "Essays," the first volume of which
appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after his death in 1882,
represent practically three stages of composition: first the
detached thoughts of the "Journal;" second, the rearrangement of
this material for use upon the lecture platform; and finally, the