reflection of a divine personality." All the religions this world
has ever known, have been but the aftermath of the ethics of one
or another holy person; "as soon as character appears be sure
love will"; "the intuition of the moral sentiment is but the
insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul"; but these
laws cannot be catalogued.

If a versatilist, a modern Goethe, for instance, could put all of
Emerson's admonitions into practice, a constant permanence would
result,--an eternal short-circuit--a focus of equal X-rays. Even
the value or success of but one precept is dependent, like that
of a ball-game as much on the batting-eye as on the pitching-arm.
The inactivity of permanence is what Emerson will not permit. He
will not accept repose against the activity of truth. But this
almost constant resolution of every insight towards the absolute
may get a little on one's nerves, if one is at all partial-wise
to the specific; one begins to ask what is the absolute anyway,
and why try to look clear through the eternities and the
unknowable even out of the other end. Emerson's fondness for
flying to definite heights on indefinite wings, and the tendency
to over-resolve, becomes unsatisfying to the impatient, who want
results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it
is occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the
rank and file. He has no definite message perhaps for the
literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his
indefiniteness, as in spite of it.

There is a suggestion of irony in the thought that the power of
his vague but compelling vitality, which ever sweeps us on in
spite of ourselves, might not have been his, if it had not been