before I knew what god of the woods Emerson then surprised, which I saw not. Many have learned, with George Meredith— "What a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life." But it is the characteristic of our time that the certainties are hotter after mortals than these are for the certainties. Some of us who have known the bitterness of seeing the old stars of faith go down, as we were wandering through the dark wolds of early life, have been guided from it by the tones of Concordia (to remember Schiller's "Bell"); but we may not have considered or remembered through what fires and hard blows Concordia had to pass ere it gained that pure voice in which the stars that had set rose again in our heart and sang together for joy. It is difficult to associate anything but happiness with Emerson; but Heine's fact stands, Wherever genius is, there is Golgotha. When Emerson had gone to dwell in Concord, and when, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the settlement of the town by his ancestors, he built their bones into the poetic monument already described, the faith in which they had so nobly wrought was to him the place of a skull. Scepticism was not in his temperament; he was a born believer; his eye was made for ineffable visions; yet the fatal shaft of criticism had reached the vulnerable point, his intellectual veracity, - and there remained not a rack of the ancient deities or heavens. Residing with his prayerful mother, in the home of the venerable minister in whom the pious traditions of his race are all embodied, what sees that walking eyeball with no past at his back? "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect." "The faith that stands on authority is not faith." "The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression: it is Monster." "The prayers and even the dogmas of our Church are like the zodiac of Denderah, and the astronomical monuments of the Hindoos, - wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and business of the people." “The Puritans in England and America found in the Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their austere piety and their longings for civil freedom. But their creed is passing away, and none arises in its room." "Christianity became a mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt before." "The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals." "The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes." "These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession of sin." In the Wiertz Museum at Brussels is pictured a maiden gazing on her own skeleton; these denials show the skeleton supplanting a form painted with the colours of faith over its shrivelled skin. But what does all this mean for a young, believing, loving, and truthful genius like that of Emerson? for a genius with the world in its winged heart? It means Milton suddenly brought down from his celestial paradise to a small prosaic solitude. As the eagle Goethe's fable tells the near result. soared, the huntsman's dart pierced its right wing and brought it to the ground. The wound was healed, but alas! the power to soar was gone. Now from the earth, pining, he can only look up to the far heaven, his haughty eye filled with a tear. A dove beholds his sorrow, and, turning for a moment from its mate, flutters to the next bush. "Cheer up, my friend," it says sweetly to the wounded king; "see how near thee are the sources of tranquil bliss. On the brook's mossy brink thy heart can meet the sunset splendours. flowers thou shalt find delicate food. fountain thy thirst may be quenched. sweet spirit of content gives all we know of happiness, and finds everywhere its food." The eagle, its lofty eye turned now to the myrtle grove where it had fallen, then into itself, said, "O wisdom, ever thou speakest as a dove!" Amid the dewy At the crystal Smitten down from his pulpit by the arrow that flieth by day, exiled from the apocalyptic city of God-however radiant in the visions of Dante and Milton -Emerson, with broken wing, still gazed on the ancient heavens. Nay, as we have seen, he flutters away to Highgate, Rydal Mount, Craigenputtock, seeking some helpful strength by which he may rise. the Trinity!" cried Coleridge. intellect!" warned Wordsworth. ward can be taken!" said Carlyle. "Believe in "Beware of your "No step thither Back, then, to Concord! Back, with however heavy a heart, to listen to what the dove may say at the door of the Old Manse! As over the chaos of crumbled beliefs this sweet spirit brooded, there arose an Eden which turned the visions, from Patmos to Rydal Mount, into mere fables of its eternal beauty. Those negations quoted above are merest thorns, which Emerson pruned away from his roses, that needed no guard but his love to garner the dawns in that garden. Every essential doctrine of every system deemed religious receives its sentence. Read in their context, the negations are shades setting forth glorious forms of affirmation ; they are discords that die in raising the heart to harmonies; they are serpents summoned only to deliver up the fruits of wisdom to him whose heel their head sustains. He has found the immortality that is not postponed; he prays the prayer that is always answered; he meets a god in every bush. His joy now looks back upon the former heaven as a prison. He has learned why nature denied man wings, and takes care that when devised they shall melt or be broken even that he may soar. XIII. DAILY BREAD. IR RALPH EMERSON in Yorkshire, if a true SIR ancestor, would never have been prouder of the lions on his shield, had he foreseen "Thomas Emerson, Baker," on the front of that house in New England where the American family was founded. This gentleman, reared under chivalrous traditions, finds himself in a wild settlement of his fellows, and recognises beside "Labour-in-vain Creek" the dragon he is to slay. Barrenness he is to conquer, swamp he is to clear. He is the best-educated man there, and well-to-do; he sees a thing needed - wholesome wheaten bread; and into bread he converts a large quantity of dust and mud. When his monument is built, let his coat of arms be carved quartered with a loaf, over the words, "He made bread for men in the wilderness." And the words of his great descendant might be added, "Real service will not lose its nobleness." Two centuries later the same English knighthood, its plume changed to a pen, its badge to an invisible charm, is found in Concord, giving to the settlers of an ideal world their daily bread. Nor was he in this less cheerful and earnest because it was a world small and lowly, so far as then visible. From the first Emerson |