The key to all this Mr. Frothingham finds in the opening sentences of Emerson's essay on "History."

EMERSON UPON HISTORY.

"There is one mind common to all individual minds. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done; for that is the only and sovereign agent. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.

...

"What is the use of telegraphy? What of newspapers? To know in each social crisis how men feel in Kansas or California, the wise man waits for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks his own heart. If they are made as he is, if they breathe the same air, eat of the same wheat, have wives and children, he knows that their joy or resentment rises to the same point as his own. The inviolate soul is in perpetual telegraphic communication with the source of events; has earlier information, a private dispatch, which relieves him of the terror which presses on the rest of the community. . . . We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective. In other words, there is properly no history-only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself—must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it does not know."

Surely no thoughtful man can accept this with

out making great allowances for the idiosyncrasies of Emerson, and his ever-present wont of expressing the varying moods of his own mental experiences. His practical philosophy descends to lower flights. We have no doubt that in times of great crisis he read the newspapers and telegrams to learn what men in Kansas and California, in Vermont and South Carolina, were feeling, never having received from the source of events any private dispatch which relieved him of the terror which was pressing on the rest of the community. His joy or resentment did not rise to the same point nor in the same direction as many of theirs. He rejoiced in many things over which the people of Carolina grieved, and grieved in many things over which they rejoiced.

For science, in the ordinary use of the term, Emerson cares little, and appears to know little. His reading, we are told, is very extensive in range, but most especially in the department of the higher imagination. "He is at home with the seers, Swedenborg, Plotinus, Plato, the books of the Hindoos, the Greek mythology, Plutarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Henry More, Hafiz; the books called sacred by the religious world; and books of natural science, especially those written by the ancients," which may be fairly put down as to a great extent imaginative. Oddly enough, Montaigne is a prime favorite with him. Upon this point Mr. Frothingham says:

"Emerson, by his principle, is delivered from the alarm of the religious man, who has a creed to defend, and from the defiance of the scientific man, who has creeds to assail. For the scientific method he professes no deep respect; for the scientific assumption none whatever. He begins with the opposite end. They start with matter; he starts with mind. They feel their way up; he feels his way down. They observe phenomena; he watches thoughts. They fancy themselves to be gradually pushing away as illusions the so-called entities of the soul; he dwells serenely with those entities, rejoicing to see men paying jubilant honor to what they mean to overturn. The facts they bring in-chemical, physiological, biological: Huxley's facts, Helmholtz's, Darwin's, Tyndall's, Spencer's, the ugly facts which theologians dispute-he accepts with eager hands, and uses to demonstrate the force and harmony of the spiritual laws."

All this seems to us to be a partial and onesided view of Emerson's philosophy, which to us is in its main aspects most essentially practical. Using the word in a good sense, it is wholly a "this world" philosophy. Of the future life, as future, he takes little account. He finds the universe thus and so. Nature is what it is; man is what he is. All are but parts of one mighty whole; and it is man's place to know nature and to put himself into harmony with it. In his view, the life that now is, and each day of it, is a part of the eternal now; not merely a preparation for some unknown future. Youth exists for itself, manhood for itself, age for itself. There

never will be a day longer than the one which is now passing; there will never be a moment more full of duty and obligation than the one in which we are drawing our present breath. To be at this moment, and at all future moments, what he ought to be; that is, in other words, to live in perpetual harmony with the immutable laws of nature-laws which are, because they could not be otherwise, being the outgrowth of the inmost being of the Divine Mind-this, in our view, is not only the central core but the sum and substance of Emerson's entire philosophy, no matter in what varying forms it may clothe itself, or how it may be tinged with hues reflected from Buddha or Plato, from Swedenborg or Confucius, from Zoroaster or Jesus. We shall try to elucidate still further our idea of the man and his teachings by passing in review over his successive works.

Considering that an interval of fully forty years elapsed between the composition of the earliest and the latest of Emerson's books, he is by no means a voluminous writer. His prose works as finally collected by himself are now issued in several shapes. In their most compact form they are comprised in three moderate volumes, each containing about as much matter as one of Dickens's large novels. The poems would make another volume somewhat smaller. The prose works are here arranged in the order of their

publication, which is not always coincident with that of their composition.

"Nature" (1836); "Miscellanies," consisting of nine collegiate addresses and public lectures, most of which had already been printed in "The Dial," and were in 1849 gathered into a volume which also included "Nature"; "Essays," in two volumes (1841 and 1847). These, revised and corrected, constitute the first volume of his prose works, brought together in 1869.

"Representative Men" (1850), "English Traits" (1856), "Conduct of Life" (1860). These constitute the second volume of his prose works, brought together in 1869.

"Society and Solitude" (1870), "Letters and Social Aims" (1875). These, with the addition of some minor pieces, constitute the third volume of the prose works. Besides these, he furnished, in 1852, several valuable chapters for the "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli," which are not contained in the collection of his works.

His poetical works are "Poems by R. W. Emerson" (1846), and "May-day, and Other Pieces" (1867). These poems were mostly written at intervals between 1840 and 1867. Most of them are short. The longest are "Woodnotes," of about five hundred lines; "May-day," of about six hundred, "Monadnock," of about five hundred, and "The Adirondacks," of about four