treated in this volume include the Moral Laws of Trade, the Uses of Labour, a Passion for a Fortune, the Moral Limits of Accumulation, and others of a similar nature, well suited to attract the attention of men in a state of society remarkable for its commercial spirit. In defence of his own unusual choice of topics, Dr Dewey, in his preface, makes a protest against the common narrow range of topics discussed in the pulpit, and adds:-'I must confess I cannot understand by what process of enlightened reasoning and conscience, the preacher can come to the conclusion, that there are wide regions of moral action and peril around him, into which he may not enter, because such unusual words as commerce, society, politics, are written over the threshold.'

The essays and lectures of Emerson have perhaps had a larger circulation than any other works of the same kind. Considering the abstruse nature of many of their topics, and their singular style, sometimes oracular and rhapsodical, it is difficult to account for the wide diffusion of such writings, though they contain many excellent passages.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON has been, during the greater part of his life, a retired student, a thinker who from time to time has given to the world the results of his own meditations, and has apparently taken very little care to adapt them to the thoughts of other men. Though his writings often oppose established opinions, and suggest many topics for discussion, he is by no means a controversial author. In reply to a letter inviting discussion, he writes: 'I could not give account of myself, if challenged. I could not possibly give you one of the arguments you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands. For I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me why I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men.' In the same letter he styles himself, with reference to his writings, 'a chartered libertine,' and confesses an 'incapacity of methodical writing.'

We know little of the biography of this author. He was born in 1803 at Boston, United States, and studied at Harvard University, where, in his eighteenth year, he took his degree as Bachelor of Arts. For some short period, he was pastor of a Unitarian congregation in his native city; but differences of opinion between himself and his hearers led to his retirement from this office.

Since then, he has passed his time in studious solitude, at Concord in Massachusetts, has occasionally lectured, and has paid a visit to friends in England. Having a competent fortune, he has been fully at liberty to choose his own topics and indulge in his style of soliloquy, and his writings prove that his simple object has been to think for himself and give free expression to his thoughts. He has no system of philosophy, no definite method of arriving at conclusions. In his views of man and naturebriefly, sometimes mysteriously expressed-he often coincides with the results of German writers on philosophy, and especially with the doctrines of Fichte. How far this may be ascribed to reading, we cannot say, though it is stated that Mr Emerson is well acquainted with the writings of the German idealists.

A poetical spirit pervades many passages in his essays and lectures; and brief descriptive sketches, often marked by wit and humour, relieve the more abstruse parts of his writings. His doctrine, so far as it refers to points in speculative theology, cannot be discussed here; but it may be said that his moral tone is uniformly noble and manly. The variety of thoughts suggested, but not unfolded in any orderly style; the union of the several styles of philosophy, poetry, fact, and description: these and other peculiar features make it no easy task to write a fair and complete criticism on the works of Emerson.

Remote from the pressure of active life in America, and apart from the crowd of restless politicians, buyers and sellers and practical speculators, there exists a philosophical, and perhaps rather dreamy little Germany-if we may so speak of a certain class of men devoted to abstruse studies. Of this circle of thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson is, to use his own words, 'the representative man.' From his quiet retirement at Concord, he has sent forth his little books, consisting of essays and lectures, full of elevated thoughts, sometimes happily but often vaguely uttered, which have exercised a considerable influence upon many readers. He has written, in an abstract manner, of man, society, government, religion, and the philosophy of nature. His religious views may be concisely described as the extreme opposite of all views based upon tradition and authority. Of that tendency of the mind and longing of the heart for unity and repose, which has led many doubters to submit their faith to the absolute guidance of a church, Emerson appears to know nothing. On the contrary, he advocates a stern self-reliance, perhaps we might say a self-isolation.

A clear criticism of Emerson's philosophical doctrines is perhaps impossible, but the main feature in his style of thinking and writing may be easily defined: it consists in the constant

use of abstract terms in isolated assertions. Wherever we open his essays, we are sure to find passages like the following:-'There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe, seen by God, is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact, and holds it fluid.' Such abstract statements-philosophy in short-hand, as they might be styled-may have their meaning in the mind of the original thinker; but to make them commonly intelligible, they require to be written out and explained by details. As an extreme instance of the condensed style in which Emerson gives the results of whole volumes of German philosophy, we may quote the following:-' Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is for ever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organised. Man imprisoned, man crystallised, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated.' This appears to be intended as a summary of a German theory; but how dark must be the expressions here used to readers not initiated in the doctrines of Schelling and Hegel! These writers developed doctrines which may be condensed into the few terms used by the American writer, but they do not use such expressions without detailed explanation. Hegel, for example, in the preface to one of his works,' employs the metaphor of 'making fluid,' to describe the dialectic method; but in the same preface, he clearly exposes the error of employing abstract or general assertions as substitutes for logical writing.

These remarks may be sufficient to prove what we have already said that any methodical account of Emerson's views of the philosophy of nature is impossible. They must be regarded simply as assertions of his own thoughts and impressions, of which he confesses that he is not able to 'give account.'

It may be readily supposed that the influence of his writings upon young readers is rather exciting and disturbing than instructive. Hawthorne seems to imply this in his description of some of the disciples of Emerson :

'Severe and sober as was the Old Manse' [a house in the village of Concord], 'it was necessary to go but a little way beyond its threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles.

1 Phaenomenologie des Geistes. Ed. von Schulze. 1832.

These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original Thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other minds, of a certain constitution, with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages, to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries-to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them-came to seek the clue that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework-travelled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers, through the midnight of the moral world, beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto.

But it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling, more or less, the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought, which in the brains of some people wrought a singular giddiness-new truth being as heady as new wine. Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense water. Such, I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who crowd so closely about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered breath, and thus become imbued with a false originality.'1

In the series of lectures on Representative Men, Montaigne is selected as the example of the sceptical tendency in thought; though sincerity and liberality are equally characteristic of the French essayist, as Emerson implies in the following passage:—

'Over his name he drew an emblematic pair of scales, and wrote “Que sçais-je ?” under it. As I look at his effigy, opposite the titlepage, I seem to hear him say: "You may play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate-I stand here for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and revenues, and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact as I see it: I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know-my house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean bald pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat and what drinks I prefer; and a hundred straws just as ridiculous-than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and

1 Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse.

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winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends that do not constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself and pump my brains, the most suitable."'

In the lecture on Goethe or the Writer, the reader must be disappointed if he expects a clear and sober statement of the merits of the celebrated German. Mr Emerson ventures to say: 'The old Eternal Genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man (Goethe) than to any other;' and yet he adds in the next sentence-'I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken.' These two statements seem hardly to admit reconciliation. That style of speaking for which Montaigne has been commended, would be very desirable in a description of the characteristics of Goethe, for many of the criticisms and commentaries on his works are remarkably vague or contradictory. Thus we find, in contrast against the enthusiastic praises bestowed by Mr Carlyle, the opinions of such German writers as Görres, Novalis, and Börne, who condemn Goethe as 'a heathen,' an 'anti-christian writer,' and ‘a preacher of moral indolence;' while Menzel carries animosity against Goethe and all his admirers to an absurd extreme; and even Theodore Parker writes: 'That Goethe, as a man, was selfish to a very high degree, a debauchee, and well-bred epicurean, who had little sympathy with what was highest in man, so long as he could crown himself with rose-buds, we are willing to admit.' Of the most enigmatical of all Goethe's writings the second part of Faust—Mr Emerson says: 'It is a philosophy of literature set in poetry. . . This reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem more truly the flower of this time. The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence.' Yet, of this same poem, an able German critic and warm admirer of Goethe,1 says: Already many passages in this second part have become riddles, and for the hopeless solution we may vainly strive until we lose our temper; while others may be readily guessed; but not without the vexation of finding, under a great array of symbols, nothing more than a trivial and insignificant result: so we may conclude, that in the course of some fifty years, the whole of this second part will be almost destitute of meaning.'

The other lectures describe as representatives-Plato, the Philosopher; Swedenborg, the Mystic; Shakspeare, the Poet; and Napoleon, the Man of the World. In all, several striking passages occur in contrast with obscure statements and exaggerated

1 Dr Vilmar-Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur.