"We have

friend's clothes," but it was achieved. never had anything in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He'shakes with his mountain mirth.' It is like the laughter of the genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house, and Windsor Castle, temple, and tower, and the future shall echo the dangerous peals. The other particular of his magnificence is in his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and grand returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as promise, now as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next ages returned the sound."

Probably the most lasting influence of Carlyle upon Emerson was derived from his political writings, which quickened in him the feeling of the practical relation of his genius to his age and country. The creed of the Puritans, that the worker must think, the thinker must work, revived in his perception that literature is a blossom that must pass away unless fulfilled in fruit.

In the first discoverable scrap of Emerson's writing there is found nearly the same literary style as in his last. The only authors whose influence seems traceable in it are Shakespeare and Montaigne; and one may remember that Montaigne's Essays is the only book known to have been in the library of Shakespeare. If

one should first meet in an essay by Emerson such sentences as, 66 Spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues," or "Nature is helped by no mean, but nature makes that mean❞—it would hardly make one pause. In his lecture on Montaigne, Emerson says, "A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to me from my father's library when a boy. It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience."

There is, however, a felicity about Emerson's expression such as is hinted in a note he wrote on verses sent to the "Dial" by Wentworth Higginson in his youth: "They have truth and earnestness, and a happier hour may add that external perfection which can neither be commanded nor described." The nearest parallel is in the authentic utterances found in the bibles of the world. Emerson was among the earliest students of Oriental scriptures, from which some of the finest passages were inserted in the "Dial." In the paper which we have been mainly reading, "Thoughts on Literature," he writes: "The Bible is the most original book in the world. This old collection of the ejaculations of love and dread, of the supreme desires and contritions of men, proceeding out of the region of the grand and eternal, by whatsoever different mouths spoken, and through a wide extent of times and countries, seems, especially if you

add to our canon the kindred sacred writings of the Hindoos, Persians, and Greeks, the alphabet of the nations."

In reading these critical judgments, one may recognise that Emerson had at a very early age liberated himself from all authorities. In his first lecture at Harvard University (1837) he said: "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books." In this spirit he gathered up the literature of the past into himself, but it was transmuted into his own life by his own experience. Herman Grimm ("National Zeitung," June 11, 1882) finds a resemblance in Emerson to Shakespeare in "the precision with which, especially in illustration, he draws from his own experience, without caring to go beyond it." And in reading or hearing his sentences on men and books, I have felt that they were not literary criticism but spiritual biography. The finest writing was worse than wasted on Emerson unless it advanced some actuality a point farther. He would forgive endless weeds where he found one sesame that could open any closed door, but cared not for the most felicitous amplifications. It is not in an ordinary sense that Emerson can be described as a literary man at all. In books he valued so much as was not book but man, and could be so proved by assimilation in another man. That writer who had helped him was the writer he could report about. that his spirit was, "Save most of men Count Gismond, who saved me!" But he knew the danger of a

Not

counterfeit; he would never pronounce a thing true gold which had not rung on his counter, nor any currency sound which he had not actually converted into the substance of life. "Cut these words and they would bleed," he says of Montaigne. Emerson's literary estimates are sometimes surprising; but his task lay in a realm where "the perfection of man is the love of use; " and where words are known only as they are made flesh, and estimated by experience of their creative power.

ON

XII.

EAGLE AND DOVE.

Na beautiful day I was walking with Emerson in a wood near Concord. It was in one of my early months at Divinity College, a period of painful recollections of my once comfortable little Egypt, left for poverty, loneliness, and a spiritual wilderness. He had questioned me about our studies up at Cambridge, and our experiences, and brought upon himself an outpouring of crude questionings and blank misgivings about the universe. He listened with a patience I now see to be divine. After a silence, and a few sympathetic words, he paused and exclaimed, "Ah! there is one of the gods of the wood!" I looked and saw nothing; then turned to him and followed his glance, but still beheld nothing unusual. He was looking with a beaming eye along the path that lay before us through a thicket. "Where?" I asked. "Did you see it?" he said, now moving on. "No, I saw nothing-what was it?" "No matter," said he gently. I repeated my question, but he still said smilingly, "Never mind if you did not see it." I was a little piqued, but said no more, and very soon was listening to discourse which obliterated anxieties about the absolute. The incident was never alluded to again, and it was long