the worshipful, thronged to Concord, as to a shrine, to see or hear the oracle, 'a beauty and a mystery,' whose master-word seemed to many worth the world. 'Young visionaries,' says Hawthorne, 'to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clew that should lead them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists whose systems, at first air, had imprisoned them in an iron frame-work-travelled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom.'

A noble antithesis to all meanness, flippancy, and sensuality, he has been a forcible protestant against materialism, has thrown his weight into the scale of justice, has fortified men against temptation, and taught them nobly to aspire. In the mountain. atmosphere of his thought, how many have been deepened and enlarged, stronger by his strength, greater by his greatness! In how many breasts has he kindled an ardent desire for improvement! How many has he inspired with a finer, higher, keener sense of the purposes of existence! Even where inconclusive, what a tonic to the will and the understanding, by his intense suggestiveness!

We are not likely to be at a loss for practical energy. In an age when commercial interests are strong, in a country where brains are zealously expended on the farm or exchange, there is pressing need of men who lay a chief stress upon the divine symbolism of material existence, that the home may not sink into a house, nor the grave into a pit, nor the fairer elements of human nature become incredible from their foul environment. This has been the mission of Emerson, as of all the sages. He has been light to the illuminators-ministers, instructors, writers. For half a century his ethical and prophetic utterance has been an active and growing power to keep the eyes of people on the strain of rare and noble visions. He has founded no school, he has left behind him no Emersonian system, but fragments of him are scattered everywhere- germs of bloom that will perish A great book is a ship deep freighted with immortal treasures, breaking the sea of life into fadeless beauty as it sails, carrying to every shore seeds of truth, goodness, piety, love, to flower and fruit perennially in the soil of the heart and mind.

never.

EPILOGUE.

We have seen a numerous and powerful society, in the enjoyment of material splendor and a complete literature, develop from the ravaging tribes that issued from the German forests, crossed the intractable sea in their pirate boats, and settled in a land of marsh and fog; ill-housed, fierce, carnivorous, long buried in grossness and brutality, but importing, with their savage and transient manners, redeeming and persistent sentiments their native fidelity and love of freedom, their instinct of the serious and sublime, their inclination for devotion, their worship of heroism, their tragi-heroic conception of the world and man. From the Saxon barbarian to the Englishman of to-day, what a transformation! From the Heptarchy to the 'Model Republic,' how vast the change! Yet in the child was the promise of the youth and adult, as a thousand forests are potentially in the acorn. The nomadic Scandinavian bore within him the germ of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Carlyle, and Emerson. A perennial miracle-Causal Power creating forever -Providential Power conserving forever—the visible proceeding from the Unseen, like an odor of incense, like a strain of music the Over-soul in active and perpetual accomplishment.

But is progress to stop here? Who knows where we are in the duration and development of the race? In the cradle still, or in opening manhood? By the same Divine law of evolution, we too, in turn, shall be outstripped. Our boundary is movable and elastic. Around any circle, another may be drawn. Each end is a beginning, and must be superseded by a better. The latest civilization will be a suggestion of new and higher possibilities. The golden ages are before us. On, ever on, toward the flying Perfect! —

Profounder, profounder
Man's spirit must dive,
To his aye-rolling orbit
No goal will arrive.

The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,

Once found, for new heavens
He spurneth the old."

At the centre of succession is the energizing mind. Beowulf and Paradise Lost, St. Peter's and the Pyramids, cities and institutions, have their roots there. History is the multiform representation of it. Other things are external and fugitive. The web of events is its flowing robe. Ever young, ever ripening, ever advancing into the illimitable. The needle has its dip, and its variation,

'But, though it trembles as it lowly lies,

Points to that light which changes not in heaven.'

For can we think of tendency without thinking of purpose? Are names and forces alone immortal, and not the souls which give them their immortality? O rich and various man, made of the dust of the earth, and living for the moment! in the majestic Past as a prophecy to the Future, in thy ceaseless discontent with the Present, in thine endless ascension of state, in thine unquenchable thirst for the Infinite, we find the blazing evidence of thine own eternity. Before the magnificent procession of History, forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, and vanishing into Fathomless Silence, wonder and veneration are the true attitude:

'Like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. . . . Like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane, haste stormfully across the astonished Earth, then plunge again into the Inane. . . . But whence?-O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God to God.'

INDEX.