Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by living again in his “Journal”—the tenth volume of which has just come to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament. Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (_his_ spirit, that is); and in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where words like _flow_, _flee_, _flux_, _fugitive_, _fugacious_, _current_, _stream_, _undulation_, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England soil, is good only while he works it. “If I cease to task myself, I have no thoughts.” And adds: “This is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and fruits at all seasons.” Many of his memoranda he developed later in the essay form—a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries[4]—but I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the author’s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realized—at fifty—what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual chiffonier, with a Jew’s rag-bag of brocade remnants and velvets and torn cloth-of-gold. Truth to tell, he is all this no less in his essays than in these Journals—and is a literary architect no more than his friend Montaigne. As he repeated his lectures, and they gained in polish and conciseness, the defect still sometimes remained: he built more than one excellent house without stairs. It is in momentary flashes of intuitive communication with the great spirits—lightning flashes that suddenly light up the black night in which we spend most of our time—that his genius shines. Somewhere in his Journal he writes: “One man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is generated by the revolution of the triangle.”