the laws of life in illusions. But the unities of truth and right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performances, on a stage of nations or in the obscurest hamlet of Maine and California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new-comer; and, according to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature." Then follows a maxim which might have been framed by Montaigne in one of his best moods: "It would be hard to put more mental and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a sentence

'Fooled thou must be, though the wisest of the wise: Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.'"

The essay

and the book close with this-often said in substance elsewhere:

ILLUSIONS THEMSELVES ILLUSIONARY.

"There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there he is alone with them alone; they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd, which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey; he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives him hither and thither; now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now

that. What is he that he should resist their will and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones-they alone with him alone."

XII.

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.

"SOCIETY and Solitude" was published in 1870. It consists of twelve chapters, and may be regarded as a fourth series of the "Essays." The topics relate mainly to matters of every-day life and common experience, such as "Civilization," "Art," "Domestic Life," "Farming, "Clubs," "Success," and "Old Age." The tone is calm and serene, rising not unfrequently into grave eloquence, less brilliant and striking than was displayed in his earlier writings. It is a book to be taken up in those halcyon hours which sometimes come to severest thinker when he longs for a temporary repose. The closing chapter on "Old Age" breathes the very spirit of the closing stanza of Wordsworth's ode on the "Intimation of Immortality":

"The clouds which gather round the setting sun Do take a silver coloring from an eye

Which hath kept watch o'er man's mortality. Another race is run, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we liveThanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears—

To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Somewhat after the manner of Cicero, in the "De Senectute," Emerson enumerates some of the consolations and blessings of a serene old age. We cite only one of these :

ACCOMPLISHED PURPOSES.

"Another felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts. Michel Angelo's head is full of masculine and gigantic figures as of gods walking, which make him savage until his furious chisel can render them into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine.

"There is the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for the world is planted. The throes continue until the child is born. Every faculty new to each man thus goads and drives him out into doleful deserts until it finds proper vent. All the functions of human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until they are performed. He

wants friends, employment, knowledge, power, house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious wants, æsthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One by one, day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his calling, homestead, social connection, and personal power; and thus, at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind. In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior."

All this, of course, relates only to persons who have attained in some good measure to the ideal of a serene old age. Not a few fail wholly of this, some by reason of faults patent to all, some by reason of circumstances seemingly quite beyond their control. Among great men who have fairly attained to this blessing we may cite the names of Wordsworth, Gibbon, Milton, Franklin, Bryant, Longfellow, John Adams, and Emerson. A very pleasant sketch is given of John Adams, at the age of almost ninety. It is all the more interesting because it is a transcript of what had been written by Emerson forty-five years before-he then being only twenty-two. He says: "I have

lately found in an old note-book a record of a visit to ex-President John Adams in 1825, soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is but a sketch, and nothing important passed in the conversation; but it reports a moment in the life of an heroic person who in extreme old age appeared still erect, and worthy of his fame."

JOHN ADAMS AT NINETY.

"To-day, at Quincy, with my brother, by invitation of Mr. Adams's family. The old President sat in a stuffed arm-chair, dressed in a blue coat, black smallclothes, white stockings; a cotton cap covered his bald head. We made our compliment, told him he must let us join our gratulations and congratulations to those of the nation on the happiness of his house.

"He thanked us, and said: 'I am rejoiced because the nation is happy. The time of gratulation and congratulation is nearly over with me. I am astonished that I have lived to see and know of this event. I have lived now nearly a century-a long, harassed, and eventful life.' I said: 'The world thinks a good deal of joy has been mixed with it.' 'The world does not know,' he replied, 'how much toil, anxiety, and sorrow I have suffered.' I asked if Mr. Adams's letter of acceptance had been read to him. "Yes,' he said; and added, 'My son has more political prudence than any man I know who has existed in my time. He was never put off his guard, and I hope he will continue such; but what effect age may work in diminishing the power of his mind, I do not know. He has been very much on the stretch ever since he was born. He has always been very laborious,