and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much."

While Auguste Comte and Mill ignored evolution, and Carlyle reviled it, Emerson was building on it as upon a rock. His friend Agassiz had committed himself rather warmly against it, though relenting in later life, and I heard several conversations between them on the subject. Emerson quoted various things from Agassiz's own works, especially his researches in embryology, which seemed to support the new theory. Agassiz said that unquestionably there was an ideal relation between organic forms, an unbroken succession of ascending types, but he denied that one species could be developed from another. This seemed to him atheism. But Emerson held no such theism as could be affected by any scientific discovery or opinion. He worshipped Thought. "Our theism is the purification of the human mind," was his brave word many years before, and it was written again on his face whenever any opinion offered itself authoritatively.

Emerson's theory of evolution was a theory of Ascent. "The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks." This was his idealism, that matter and mind, as they are called, are varied movements of one symphony.

On this he rested his idea of "Poetry." His essay on this subject in "Letters and Social Aims," published in 1876, was read to a small company in Divinity College twenty-three years before. Some of us at

Harvard University had found our real professor at Concord, and one winter evening we went out, travelling the seventeen miles in sleighs, to hear a lecture that was to have been given by him. The lecture had been postponed, but Emerson, hearing of our arrival, invited us to his house, and we went back enriched by his conversation, without feeling any disappointment. Nevertheless, Emerson wrote me that if I would make the preparations, he would read a lecture in my room. On that occasion, besides the students who had gone to Concord for the lecture, others were present, including Mr. and Mrs. Longfellow, J. R. Lowell, Mrs. Charles Lowell, J. S. Dwight, Charles Norton and his sister, L. G. Ware, H. G. Denny, and Otto Dresel. In that essay Emerson said: "The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago, arrested and progressive development, indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to tle highest organisms, gave the poetic key to natural science, of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz, and Owen and Darwin in zoology and botany, are the fruits, a hint whose power is not yet exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.

"The hardest chemist, the severest analyser, scornful of all but the driest fact, is forced to keep the poetic curve of Nature, and his result is like a myth of Theocritus. All multiplicity rushes to be resolved. into unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit arrested or progressive ascent in each kind, the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to the highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate, mollusk, articu

late, vertebrate, up to man; as if the whole animal world were only a Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind."

The Darwin here referred to is the elder Erasmus Darwin; it was five years later than the revelation of the method of this progression appeared in the paper of Charles Darwin published in the Linnæan Society's Journal (1858). And now that the noble Boston Museum is built, whose successive storeys repeat the history and ascent of organisation in the earth, there might be written on its door that which Emerson further said to us in that small company "Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher. There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force."

From this pedestal, like some white column resting on lions winged and couching, carved in its ascent with the symbols of every faith, rose Emerson's dream of the true poem. "In poetry we require the miracle. The bee flies among flowers, and gets mint and marjoram, and generates a new product, which is not mint and marjoram, but honey; the chemist mixes hydrogen and oxygen to yield a new product, which is not these, but water; and the poet listens to conversation, and beholds all objects in nature, to give back, not them, but a new and transcendent whole."

There were poets present, but when this great essay paused, and only an ideal poet crowned the exalted shaft, it appeared the truest New World poem that we were gathered there around the seer, in whose vision the central identity in nature flowed through man's reason, gently did away with discords by their promise of

larger harmonies. That which the Brahmans had found in the East our little company knew there in the West also: "From the poisonous tree of the world two species of fruit are produced, sweet as the waters of life: Love, or the society of beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is like the immortal juice of Vishnu." When Emerson finished there was still a hush of silence: it seemed hardly broken when Otto Dresel performed some "Songs without Words."

W

XVII.

SURSUM CORDA.

HEN the rumour reached the Boston ministers that Emerson had made a visitation at Divinity College, there was some small flutter, and even a little inquisition; whereat our good professors - Dr. Francis and Dr. Noyes — smiled, as old sailors might at the shaken nerves which turn squalls to hurricanes. The breeze was useful as a suggestion of the real tornadoes which followed Emerson's earlier visits to Cambridge, concerning which the traditions remained fresh enough up to the time (1867) when the University surrendered, made Emerson Doctor of Laws, and Overseer, and a Special Lecturer to the young men he had all along been really teaching. To that earlier period we now

return.

The little book of 1836, entitled "Nature," was a soft footfall in the solitude of Concord, but clerical readjusters of their religious inheritance, with the keen sense of a threatened race, laid their ear to the ground and heard battalions behind that hermit. "It is a suggestive book," the "Christian Examiner " must admit. "But the effort of perusal is often painful, the thoughts excited are frequently bewildering, and the results to which they lead us uncertain and obscure. The reader