"Farming," "Books," "Eloquence," "Old Age," exhibit a shrewd
prudential wisdom, a sort of Yankee instinct for "the milk in the
pan," that reminds one of Ben Franklin. Like most of the greater
New England writers, he could be, on occasion, an admirable local
historian. See his essays on "Life and Letters in New England,"
"New England Reformers," "Politics," and the successive entries
in his "Journal" relating to Daniel Webster. He had the happiest
gift of portraiture, as is witnessed by his sketches of
Montaigne, of Napoleon, of Socrates (in the essay on Plato), of
his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, of Thoreau, and of various types of
Englishmen in his "English Traits." But the great essays, no
doubt, are those like "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The
Over-Soul," "Fate," "Power," "Culture," "Worship," and
"Illusions." These will puzzle no one who has read carefully that
first book on "Nature." They all preach the gospel of intuition,
instinctive trust in the Universe, faith in the ecstatic moment
of vision into the things that are unseen by the physical eye.
Self-reliance, as Emerson's son has pointed out, means really
God-reliance; the Over-Soul--always a stumbling-block to
Philistines--means that high spiritual life into which all men
may enter and in which they share the life of Deity. Emerson is
stern enough in expounding the laws of compensation that run
through the universe, but to him the chief law is the law of the
ever-ascending, victorious soul.

This radiant optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a
singer as well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless
deficient in the singing voice. He composed no one great poem,
his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his prose. In
metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he has marvelous