“anyhow, I felt that there was better work for me to do than to preach from the pulpit.” And so, no doubt, there was for this wonderfully gifted man, particularly at the time and in the place where he lived. A few years’ study at Göttingen might have been useful to the younger Emerson by showing him the track followed by other explorers of the unknown seas of religion and philosophy, but he felt in himself the force to grapple with the great problems of the world without going first to school to learn how others before him had grappled with them. And this was perhaps the best for him and for us. His freshness and his courage remained undamped by the failures of others, and the directness of his judgment and poetical intuition had freer scope in his rhapsodies than it would have had in learned treatises. I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had at first nothing to say to his essays because they did not seem to advance their favourite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any learned disquisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness, self-confidence, unswerving loyalty to truth, as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please. Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life again in America, might have spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that produced by Socrates in olden times. What Emerson’s personal charm must have been in earlier life we can only conjecture from the rapturous praises bestowed on him by his friends, even during his lifetime. A friend of his who had watched Emerson and his work and his ever-increasing influence, declares without hesitation that “the American nation is more indebted to his teaching than to any other person who has spoken or written on his themes during the last twenty years.” He calls his genius “the measure and present expansion of the American mind.” And his influence was not confined to the American mind. I have watched it growing in England. I still remember the time when even experienced literary judges spoke of his essays as mere declamations, as poetical rhapsodies, as poor imitations of Carlyle. Then gradually one man after another found something in Emerson which was not to be found in Carlyle, particularly his loving heart, his tolerant spirit, his comprehensive sympathy with all that was or was meant to be good and true, even though to his own mind it was neither the one nor the other.