No American author has done more to exalt the individual, to inspire him to act according to his own intuitions and to mold the world by his own will. Young Americans especially listened to his call, "O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas." ESSAYS.--The bulk of Emerson's work consists of essays, made up in large part from lectures. In 1841 he published a volume, known as _Essays, First Series_, and in 1844, another volume, called _Essays, Second Series_. Other volumes followed from time to time, such as _Miscellanies_ (1849), _Representative Men_ (1850), _English Traits_ (1856), _The Conduct of Life_ (1860), _Society and Solitude_ (1870). While the _First Series_ of these _Essays_ is the most popular, one may find profitable reading and even inspiring passages scattered through almost all of his works, which continued to appear for more than forty years. When we examine his _Essays, First Series_, we find that the volume is composed of short essays on such subjects as _History_, _Self-Reliance_, _Friendship_, _Heroism_, and the _Over-Soul_. If we choose to read _Self-Reliance_, one of his most typical essays, we shall find that the sentences, or the clauses which take the place of sentences, are short, vigorous, and intended to reach the attention through the ear. For instance, he says in this essay:-- "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion." Before we have finished _Self-Reliance_, he has made us feel that, with the exercise of self-trust, new powers will appear; that a man should not postpone his life, but live now; that a man is weak if he expects aid from others; that discontent is want of self-reliance. We pick up another volume of essays, _Society and Solitude_, and wonder whether we shall read _Success_, or _Books_, or _Civilization_, or any one of nine others. While we are turning the pages, we see this sentence:-- "Hitch your wagon to a star," and we decide to read _Civilization_. "Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. ... We cannot bring the heavenly powers to us, but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure.... Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way." The youth is to be pitied if this does not quicken his determination to choose his work in the direction in which the aiding forces of the universe are traveling.