THE LIBERATOR OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. TO classify Emerson is a matter of no small difficulty. He was a philosopher, he was an essayist, he was a poet――all three so eminently that scarcely two of his friends would agree to which class he most belonged. Oliver Wendell Holmes asks: “Where in the realm of thought whose air is song Does he the Buddha of the west belong? He seems a winged Franklin sweetly wise, Born to unlock the secret of the skies.” But whatever he did was done with a poetic touch. Philosophy, essay or song, it was all pregnant with the spirit of poetry. Whatever else he was, Emerson was pre-eminently a poet. It was with this golden key that he unlocked the chambers of original thought, that liberated American letters. Until Emerson came, American authors had little independence. James Russell Lowell declares, “We were socially and intellectually bound to English thought, until Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue waters. He was our first optimistic writer. Before his day, Puritan theology had seen in man only a vile nature and considered his instincts for beauty and pleasure, proofs of his total depravity.” Under such conditions as these, the imagination was fettered and wholesome literature was impossible. As a reaction against this Puritan austerity came Unitarianism, which aimed to establish the dignity of man, and out of this came the further growth of the idealism or transcendentalism of Emerson. It was this idea and these aspirations of the new theology that Emerson converted into literature. The indirect influence of his example on the writings of Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier and Lowell, and its direct influence on Thoreau, Hawthorne, Chas. A. Dana, Margaret Fuller, G. W. Curtis and others, formed the very foundation for the beautiful structure of our representative American literature. Emerson was profoundly a thinker who pondered the relation of man to God and to the universe. He conceived and taught the noblest ideals of virtue and a spiritual life. The profound study which Emerson devoted to his themes and his philosophic cast of mind made him a writer for scholars. He was a prophet who, without argument, announced truths which, by intuition, he seems to have perceived; but the thought is often so shadowy that the ordinary reader fails to catch it. For this reason he will never be like Longfellow or Whittier, a favorite with the masses. Let it not be understood, however, that all of Emerson’s writings are heavy or shadowy or difficult to understand. On the contrary, some of his poems are of a popular character and are easy of comprehension. For instance, “The Hymn,” sung at the completion of the Concord Monument in 1836, was on every one’s lips at the time of the Centennial celebration, in 1876. His optimistic spirit is also beautifully and clearly expressed in the following stanza of his “Voluntaries:”