The Last Harvest | Page 4

speech with such.
You might turn a yoke of oxen between every pair of words; and the
behavior is as awkward and proud."
* * * * *

"I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, not with
explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and
agreeable influence stealing like a scent of a flower, or the sight of a
new landscape on a traveller. I neither wish to be hated and defied by
such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose
thoughts I stimulate."
Here Emerson did center in himself and never apologized. His gospel
of self-reliance came natural to him. He was emphatically self, without
a trace of selfishness. He went abroad to study himself more than other
people--to note the effect of Europe on himself. He says, "I believe it's
sound philosophy that wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole
object we study and learn. Montaigne said himself was all he knew.
Myself is much more than I know, and yet I know nothing else." In
Paris he wrote to his brother William, "A lecture at the Sorbonne is far
less useful to me than a lecture that I write myself"; and as for the
literary society in Paris, though he thought longingly of it, yet he said,
"Probably in years it would avail me nothing."
The Journals are mainly a record of his thoughts and not of his days,
except so far as the days brought him ideas. Here and there the personal
element creeps in--some journey, some bit of experience, some visitor,
or walks with Channing, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jones Very, and others;
some lecturing experience, his class meetings, his travels abroad and
chance meetings with distinguished men. But all the more purely
personal element makes up but a small portion of the ten thick volumes
of his Journal. Most readers, I fancy, will wish that the proportion of
these things were greater. We all have thoughts and speculations of our
own, but we can never hear too much about a man's real life.
Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New
England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a
reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.
He is the poet and prophet of the moral ideal. His main significance is
religious, though nothing could be farther from him than creeds and
doctrines, and the whole ecclesiastical formalism. There is an
atmosphere of sanctity about him that we do not feel about any other

poet and essayist of his time. His poems are the fruit of Oriental
mysticism and bardic fervor grafted upon the shrewd, parsimonious,
New England puritanic stock. The stress and wild, uncertain melody of
his poetry is like that of the wind-harp. No writing surpasses his in the
extent to which it takes hold of the concrete, the real, the familiar, and
none surpasses his in its elusive, mystical suggestiveness, and its
cryptic character. It is Yankee wit and shrewdness on one side, and
Oriental devoutness, pantheism, and symbolism on the other. Its
cheerful and sunny light of the common day enhances instead of
obscures the light that falls from the highest heaven of the spirit. Saadi
or Hafiz or Omar might have fathered him, but only a New England
mother could have borne him. Probably more than half his poetry
escapes the average reader; his longer poems, like "Initial, Dæmonic,
and Celestial Love," "Monadnoc," "Merlin," "The Sphinx," "The
World-Soul," set the mind groping for the invisible rays of the
spectrum of human thought and knowledge, but many of the shorter
poems, such as "The Problem," "Each and All," "Sea-Shore," "The
Snow-Storm," "Musketaquid," "Days," "Song of Nature," "My
Garden," "Boston Hymn," "Concord Hymn," and others, are among the
most precious things in our literature.
As Emerson was a bard among poets, a seer among philosophers, a
prophet among essayists, an oracle among ethical teachers, so, as I have
said, was he a solitary among men. He walked alone. He somewhere
refers to his "porcupine impossibility of contact with men." His very
thoughts are not social among themselves, they separate. Each stands
alone; often they hardly have a bowing acquaintance; over and over
their juxtaposition is mechanical and not vital. The redeeming feature is
that they can afford to stand alone, like shafts of marble or granite.
The force and worth of his page is not in its logical texture, but in the
beauty and truth of its isolated sentences and paragraphs. There is little
inductive or deductive reasoning in his books, but a series of
affirmations whose premises and logical connection the reader does not
always see.
He records that his hearers