To the average reader these ideas are bewildering and have been collectively designated as “a new philosophy maintaining that nothing is everything in general, and everything is nothing in particular.” It is related as a fact, that after an address by Emerson before a college society, the minister in charge of the meeting devoutly prayed that the hearers might be preserved from ever again being compelled to listen to such transcendental nonsense. At the close of the meeting Emerson imperturbably remarked that the gentleman seemed a very conscientious, plain-spoken man. The distance between Emerson’s thought and that of most men laid him open to the charge of obscurity, an accusation which is still widely repeated by those who do not trouble themselves to read or to think. It cannot be denied that Emerson is often mystical, and that he must find spiritual insight and almost poetic imagination in those who would penetrate to the heart of his teachings; but it is unfair to give the impression that, save to the initiated, he is nearly always incomprehensible. Page after page of his writings offers no difficulty whatever to the most cursory reader, and his work as a whole is within the ken of any serious and unprejudiced reader. In style Emerson is sometimes forbidding through a strong tendency to condensation of expression; but the beauty of his thought frequently draws to itself a diction and order which transform his prose into veritable poetry. His strong, earnest spirituality is never fanatical, his perfect trust in what he called the Over-Soul is never sentimental, his full confidence that the world is making for ultimate good is never unpractical. Looking upon the universe as “one vast symbol of God,” he escaped pantheism on one hand and materialism on the other. As a teacher uttering his uplifting thought through literature, Emerson, it may be confidently said, stands without a rival among American writers.