And now I think I have cleared the ground. I have given up to envious Time as much of Emerson as Time can fairly expect ever to obtain. We have not in Emerson a great poet, a great writer, a great philosophy-maker. His relation to us is not that of one of those personages; yet it is a relation of, I think, even superior importance. His relation to us is more like that of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is not a great writer, a great philosophy-maker; he is the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit. Emerson is the same. He is the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit. All the points in thinking which are necessary for this purpose he takes; but he does not combine them into a system, or present them as a regular philosophy. Combined in a system by a man with the requisite talent for this kind of thing, they would be less useful than as Emerson gives them to us; and the man with the talent so to systematise them would be less impressive than Emerson. They do very well as they now stand;—like ‘boulders,’ as he says;—in ‘paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.’ In such sentences his main points recur again and again, and become fixed in the memory. We all know them. First and foremost, character. Character is everything. ‘That which all things tend to educe,—which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver,—is character.’ Character and self-reliance. ‘Trust thyself! every heart vibrates to that iron string.’ And yet we have our being in a _not ourselves_. ‘There is a power above and behind us, and we are the channels of its communications.’ But our lives must be pitched higher. ‘Life must be lived on a higher plane; we must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there the whole scene changes.’ The good we need is for ever close to us, though we attain it not. ‘On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying.’ This good is close to us, moreover, in our daily life, and in the familiar, homely places. ‘The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties,—that is the maxim for us. Let us be poised and wise, and our own to-day. Let us treat the men and women well,—treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labour. I settle myself ever firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with; accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and if we will tarry a little we may come to learn that here is best. See to it