The process of maturing, with the spirit as with the body, with man as with the various organic growths, is more or less a hardening and toughening process,--a hardening for strength and endurance. Emerson belongs to the earlier period, before the hardening has progressed far, while the grain of our thoughts is yet in the milk. He appeals to us most strongly in youth or early manhood, when we are not too critical and while we are yet full of brave and generous impulses. A little callow we may be, but buoyant and optimistic. As we grow older something seems to evaporate from him, and one returns to his pages in middle or later life as to the scene of some youthful festival, half religious, half social, in which he took part, and the memory of which still stirs his emotions. Emerson finally dropped the church, but he never ceased to be a clergyman. He was like a flower escaped from the garden, and finding a lodgment in an adjoining field, but which never ceased to be a garden flower. A certain sanctity and unworldliness always clung to him,--a certain remoteness from the common thoughts, aims, attractions, of everyday humanity. If he had been a better worldling he would have been a better poet,--that is, if he had had more of the feelings, passions, sympathies and thoughts of ordinary men. These things would have given him more flexibility and brought him closer to human life. Rarely, as poet or prose writer, could he speak in the tone of the people. There was always, more or less concealed, the tone of the pulpit. Mr. James expressed this idea well when he said that Emerson “had no prosaic side relating him to ordinary people.” This prosaic side is very important to the poet, or to any man who would touch and move his fellow-men. We desire our singer or teacher to be of the same flesh and blood as ourselves. Emerson was always a preacher, and his theme, by whatever name he called it, was always religion, or what he called religion, namely, the universality of the moral law. No lover of Emerson, I imagine, would have had him other than what he was; I certainly would not. At the same time it is a pleasure to explore his limitations and see just what he was, and what he was not. He was a rare soul, probably the most astral genius in English or any other literature. His books are for young men and for those of a religious cast of mind. His signal defect as a writer, as a contributor to the world’s literature, arises from this same want of sympathy with the world,--from the select, abridged, circumscribed character of his genius. He did not and could not deal with human life as Montaigne, or Bacon, or Plutarch, or Cicero did.