us incline to go with him but half-way; and then stand and build
dogmas. But if we can not follow all the way--if we do not always
clearly perceive the whole picture, we are at least free to
imagine it--he makes us feel that we are free to do so; perhaps
that is the most he asks. For he is but reaching out through and
beyond mankind, trying to see what he can of the infinite and its
immensities--throwing back to us whatever he can--but ever
conscious that he but occasionally catches a glimpse; conscious
that if he would contemplate the greater, he must wrestle with
the lesser, even though it dims an outline; that he must struggle
if he would hurl back anything--even a broken fragment for men to
examine and perchance in it find a germ of some part of truth;
conscious at times, of the futility of his effort and its
message, conscious of its vagueness, but ever hopeful for it, and
confident that its foundation, if not its medium is somewhere
near the eventual and "absolute good" the divine truth underlying
all life. If Emerson must be dubbed an optimist--then an optimist
fighting pessimism, but not wallowing in it; an optimist, who
does not study pessimism by learning to enjoy it, whose
imagination is greater than his curiosity, who seeing the sign-
post to Erebus, is strong enough to go the other way. This
strength of optimism, indeed the strength we find always
underlying his tolerance, his radicalism, his searches,
prophecies, and revelations, is heightened and made efficient by
"imagination-penetrative," a thing concerned not with the
combining but the apprehending of things. A possession, akin to
the power, Ruskin says, all great pictures have, which "depends
on the penetration of the imagination into the true nature of the
thing represented, and on the scorn of the imagination for all
shackles and fetters of mere external fact that stand in the way