single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and
ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse,
he is capable here and there of the true miracle of transforming
fact and thought into true beauty. Aldrich used to say that he
would rather have written Emerson's "Bacchus" than any American
poem.

That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson was universal in
its survey of human forces, no one would claim. Certain
limitations in interest and sympathy are obvious. "That horrid
burden and impediment of the soul which the churches call sin,"
to use John Morley's words, occupied his attention but little.
Like a mountain climber in a perilous pass, he preferred to look
up rather than down. He does not stress particularly those old
human words, service and sacrifice. "Anti-scientific, antisocial,
anti-Christian" are the terms applied to him by one of his most
penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say "un-scientific,"
"unsocial," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which Plato and
Isaiah are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer the
truth to say, as Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a
technical Christian." He tends to underestimate institutions of
every kind; history, except as a storehouse of anecdote, and
culture as a steady mental discipline. This is the price he pays
for his transcendental insistence upon the supreme value of the
Now, the moment of insight. But after all these limitations are
properly set down, the personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains
a priceless possession to his countrymen. The austere serenity of
his life, and the perfection with which he represents the highest
type of his province and his era, will ultimately become blended
with the thought of his true Americanism. A democrat and