"We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to offer liberty instead of chains, and see whether liberty will not disclose its proper checks; believing that a free press will prove safer than the censorship; to ordain free trade, and believe that it will not bankrupt us; universal suffrage, believing that it will not carry us to mobs or back to kings again." "Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age--lasting as time and space--embosomed in time and space. And time and space, what are they? Our first problems, which we ponder all our lives through, and leave where we found them; whose outrunning immensity, the old Greeks believed, astonished the gods themselves; of whose dizzy vastitudes, all the worlds of God are a mere dot on the margin; impossible to deny, impossible to believe. Yet the moral element in man counterpoises this dismaying immensity and bereaves it of terror." Emerson has been called the prince of Transcendentalists. It is nearer the truth to call him the prince of idealists. A Transcendentalist, in the technical sense of the term, it cannot be clearly affirmed that he was. Certainly he cannot be reckoned a disciple of Kant, or Jacobi, or Fichte, or Schelling. He calls no man master; he receives no teaching on authority. It is not certain that he ever made a study of the Transcendental philosophy in the works of its chief exposition. In his lecture on "The Transcendentalist," delivered in 1842, he conveys the impression that it is idealism--active and protesting--an excited reaction against formalism, tradition, and conventionalism in every sphere. As such, he describes it with great vividness and beauty. But as such merely, it was not apprehended by metaphysicians like James Walker, theologians like Parker or preachers like William Henry Channing.