I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now that I have read in President Eliot’s centenary essay on the great New Englander his confession that he too, “as a young man,” found the writings of Emerson “unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, … speculative, and visionary.” It is only after one has suffered from living that one fully values Emerson—only as one is gradually educated himself, in experience’s school, that one appreciates his worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot calls “natural” rather than supernatural religion. III For this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the Tabernacle— So nigh is grandeur to our dust So nigh is God to man. “Christianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system of doctrines,” he wrote in his diary as a young man—thereby fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a century later: “You cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a theology out of Emerson.” His stress was placed—as he was persuaded Christ’s was—upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: “I feel myself pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence.” Demonstrate? Emerson never did succeed in “demonstrating” very much. In Dr. Eliot’s words, here was no logician or reasoner, but “a poet who wrote chiefly in prose.” But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphrase— His every line, of noble origin, Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath. Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. “I notice that as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”[3]