_Ralph Waldo Emerson._--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), serious, high-minded, and well balanced, affords a striking contrast in almost every way to Poe. Born in Boston, he was graduated from Harvard College at the age of nineteen. After teaching school for a time, he became minister of the Old North Church in his native city, but in 1835 withdrew from his charge because of his aversion to the rite of the Lord’s Supper. Taking up his residence at Concord, Massachusetts, he spent the rest of his years in writing and lecturing. While engaged in the latter work he went as far west as California and made two visits abroad. During the first, Emerson met Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor, and De Quincey, who received him graciously, George Eliot, who referred to him as “the first man she had ever seen,” and Carlyle, who found in the visitor a hero well worthy of sincere admiration. Dignified and simple in manner, deep and kindly in thought, he found contentment in an uneventful career; sympathising strongly with those who would live the life of the spirit, he supported in theory the Brook Farm experiment; advocating anti-slavery ideas, he opened his church to Abolition agitators; but objecting on principle to war, he proposed to buy the slaves and educate them morally. He went down to his grave loved by his neighbours and honoured by many who knew him only through his works. Emerson made his earliest appearance as a writer in a book entitled “Nature” (1836), but he first attracted real attention by his Phi Beta Kappa oration before Harvard College in 1837. This address, now published in his collected works as “The American Scholar,” made so strong an appeal to his listeners to break away from the influence of England in matters of authorship that Holmes with his usual felicity termed it “our literary Declaration of Independence.” For three or four years, beginning in 1840, Emerson was editor of _The Dial_. In 1841 he published his first collection of “Essays”; and three years later his second. From then on at irregular intervals other volumes of like content appeared; of these the most important, in all probability, are “Representative Men” (1850), “The Conduct of Life” (1860), and “Society and Solitude” (1870). There is no need of an enumeration of Emerson’s books, since they are all similar in form, content, and purpose. While Emerson is in no true sense a philosopher, he did project a theory of life. Sincerity he regarded as fundamental, and his belief in the formative influence of great men was almost identical with that held by Carlyle. By the possession of “transcendental reason,” man, according to Emerson, becomes intuitively aware of the truth. This truth or doctrine has been reduced by some critic to three propositions: (1) God is in all things and all things are in God. (2) Each created existence is essential to every other created existence. (3) Nothing which has once existed ever ceases to exist.