In ‘Compensation’ the essayist notes those inexorable forces by which a balance is kept in the world, the laws by virtue of which ‘things refuse to be mismanaged long.’ In ‘Spiritual Laws’ he shows the importance of living the life of nature. Let no man import into his mind ‘difficulties which are none of his.’ The essay on ‘Love’ is a prose poem in honor of that passion which ‘makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart.’ Following it is the essay on ‘Friendship’ with its austere definitions. ‘I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage.’ ‘Friendship implies sincerity, and sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank.’ Emerson writes on ‘Prudence’ in order to balance those fine lyric words of Love and Friendship with words of coarser sound. Prudence considered in itself is naught; but recognized as one of the conditions of existence, it deserves our utmost attention. It keeps a man from standing in false and bitter relations to other men. Emerson had no patience with people who, because they have genius or beauty, expect an exception of the laws of Nature to be made in their case. Notwithstanding their gifts, they must toe the mark. ‘Heroism,’ the eighth essay in this volume, contains a definition of the hero which does not coincide with the popular conception. We are so accustomed to seeing our heroes crowned with wreaths and overwhelmed with lecture engagements the day following the act of valor that we are surprised to read: ‘Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind.’ Emerson gives a new turn to the old phrase ‘the heroic in everyday life.’ Life, he says, has its ‘ragged and dangerous front.’ It is full of evils against which the man must be armed. ‘Let him hear in season that he is born into a state of war.’ To this ‘militant attitude of the soul’ Emerson gave the name of heroism. In its rudest form it is ‘contempt for safety and ease.’ To some readers the essay on ‘The Over-Soul’ is at once the clearest and the most darkened, the plainest and the most enigmatic of the essays in this book. But there is no misapprehending the value of this effort to put, not in rigid scientific terms, but in glowing and lofty imagery, the dependence of man on the Infinite, the marvel of that Immensity which is the background of our being. ‘From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.’ It is the universal mind by which all being is enveloped and interpenetrated. The essay on ‘Circles’ contains this thought: Outside every circle another may be drawn. Opinion seeks to crystallize at a certain limit, to insist that there is nothing beyond. The soul bursts these barriers to set new limits, which in turn are good only for a time. Man must therefore keep himself always open to the conception of a larger circle. Let him ‘prefer truth to his past apprehension of truth.’