of its suggestiveness"--a possession which gives the strength of
distance to his eyes, and the strength of muscle to his soul.
With this he slashes down through the loam--nor would he have us
rest there. If we would dig deep enough only to plant a doctrine,
from one part of him, he would show us the quick-silver in that
furrow. If we would creed his Compensation, there is hardly a
sentence that could not wreck it, or could not show that the idea
is no tenet of a philosophy, but a clear (though perhaps not
clearly hurled on the canvas) illustration of universal justice--
of God's perfect balances; a story of the analogy or better the
identity of polarity and duality in Nature with that in morality.
The essay is no more a doctrine than the law of gravitation is.
If we would stop and attribute too much to genius, he shows us
that "what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no
one man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse." If we would find in
his essay on Montaigne, a biography, we are shown a biography of
scepticism--and in reducing this to relation between "sensation
and the morals" we are shown a true Montaigne--we know the man
better perhaps by this less presentation. If we would stop and
trust heavily on the harvest of originality, he shows us that
this plant--this part of the garden--is but a relative thing. It
is dependent also on the richness that ages have put into the
soil. "Every thinker is retrospective."

Thus is Emerson always beating down through the crust towards the
first fire of life, of death and of eternity. Read where you
will, each sentence seems not to point to the next but to the
undercurrent of all. If you would label his a religion of ethics
or of morals, he shames you at the outset, "for ethics is but a