as often as truth remains constant. Revelation perhaps, is but
prophecy intensified--the intensifying of its mason-work as well
as its steeple. Simple prophecy, while concerned with the past,
reveals but the future, while revelation is concerned with all
time. The power in Emerson's prophecy confuses it with--or at
least makes it seem to approach--revelation. It is prophecy with
no time element. Emerson tells, as few bards could, of what will
happen in the past, for his future is eternity and the past is a
part of that. And so like all true prophets, he is always modern,
and will grow modern with the years--for his substance is not
relative but a measure of eternal truths determined rather by a
universalist than by a partialist. He measured, as Michel Angelo
said true artists should, "with the eye and not the hand." But to
attribute modernism to his substance, though not to his
expression, is an anachronism--and as futile as calling today's
sunset modern.

As revelation and prophecy, in their common acceptance are
resolved by man, from the absolute and universal, to the relative
and personal, and as Emerson's tendency is fundamentally the
opposite, it is easier, safer and so apparently clearer, to think
of him as a poet of natural and revealed philosophy. And as such,
a prophet--but not one to be confused with those singing
soothsayers, whose pockets are filled, as are the pockets of
conservative-reaction and radical demagoguery in pulpit, street-
corner, bank and columns, with dogmatic fortune-tellings.
Emerson, as a prophet in these lower heights, was a conservative,
in that he seldom lost his head, and a radical, in that he seldom
cared whether he lost it or not. He was a born radical as are all
true conservatives. He was too much "absorbed by the absolute,"