The Last Harvest | Page 5

found his lectures fine and poetical but a

little puzzling. "One thought them as good as a kaleidoscope." The
solid men of business said that they did not understand them but their
daughters did.
The lecture committee in Illinois in 1856 told him that the people
wanted a hearty laugh. "The stout Illinoian," not finding the laugh,
"after a short trial walks out of the hall." I think even his best Eastern
audiences were always a good deal puzzled. The lecturer never tried to
meet them halfway. He says himself of one of his lectures, "I found
when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only
the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs." The absence of the
stairs in his house--of an easy entrance into the heart of the subject, and
of a few consecutive and leading ideas--will, in a measure, account for
the bewilderment of his hearers. When I heard Emerson in 1871 before
audiences in Baltimore and Washington, I could see and feel this
uncertainty and bewilderment in his auditors.
His lectures could not be briefly summarized. They had no central
thought. You could give a sample sentence, but not the one sentence
that commanded all the others. Whatever he called it, his theme, as he
himself confesses, was always fundamentally the same: "In all my
lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private
man. This the people accept readily enough and even with loud
commendations as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or Literature,
or the Household, but the moment I call it Religion they are shocked,
though it be only the application of the same truth which they receive
everywhere else to a new class of facts."
Emerson's supreme test of a man, after all other points had been
considered, was the religious test: Was he truly religious? Was his pole
star the moral law? Was the sense of the Infinite ever with him? But
few contemporary authors met his requirements in this respect. After
his first visit abroad, when he saw Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and others, he said they were all second-or third-rate men
because of their want of the religious sense. They all looked backward
to a religion of other ages, and had no faith in a present revelation.
His conception of the divine will as the eternal tendency to the good of

the whole, active in every atom, every moment, is one of the thoughts in
which religion and science meet and join hands.
III
In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian worlds in their
making--the essays, the addresses, the poems. Here are the nebulæ and
star-dust out of which most of them came, or in which their suggestion
lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his printed
volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of æsthetic
emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes are less promising, I think,
than the prose; they are evidently more experimental, and show the
'prentice hand more.
The themes around which his mind revolved all his life--nature, God,
the soul--and their endless variations and implications, recur again and
again in each of the ten printed volumes of the Journals. He has new
thoughts on Character, Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners, Experience,
Nature, Immortality, and scores of other related subjects every day, and
he presents them in new connections and with new images. His mind
had marked centrality, and fundamental problems were always near at
hand with him. He could not get away from them. He renounced the
pulpit and the creeds, not because religion meant less to him, but
because it meant more. The religious sentiment, the feeling of the
Infinite, was as the sky over his head, and the earth under his feet.
The whole stream of Emerson's mental life apparently flowed through
his Journals. They were the repository of all his thoughts, all his
speculations, all his mental and spiritual experiences. What a mélange
they are! Wise sayings from his wide reading, from intercourse with
men, private and public, sayings from his farmer neighbors, anecdotes,
accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary or in the company of
Channing, Hawthorne, or Thoreau, his gropings after spiritual truths,
and a hundred other things, are always marked by what he says that
Macaulay did not possess--elevation of mind--and an abiding love for
the real values in life and letters.
Here is the prose origin of "Days": "The days come and go like muffled

and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say
nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as
silently away." In this brief May entry we probably see the inception of
the "Humble-Bee" poem: "Yesterday in the woods