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coincide with the popular conception. We are so accustomed to seeing our heroes crowned with wreaths and overwhelmed with lecture engagements the day following the act of valor that we are surprised to read: Heroism works in contradic'tion to the voice of mankind.' Emerson gives a new turn to the old phrase ' the heroic in every-day 'life.' Life, he says, has its 'ragged and dangerous 'front.' It is full of evils against which the man must be armed. Let him hear in season that he is born into a state of war.' To this militant ' attitude of the soul' Emerson gave the name of heroism. In its rudest form it is 'contempt for safety and ease.'

To some readers the essay on 'The Over-Soul' is at once the clearest and the most darkened, the plainest and the most enigmatic of the essays in this book. But there is no misapprehending the value of this effort to put, not in rigid scientific terms, but in glowing and lofty imagery, the dependence of man on the Infinite, the marvel of that Immensity which is the background of our being. From within or from behind, a light 'shines through us upon things, and makes us ' aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.’ It is the universal mind by which all being is enveloped and interpenetrated.

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The essay on Circles' contains this thought: Outside every circle another may be drawn. Opinion seeks to crystallize at a certain limit, to

THE ESSAYS

insist that there is nothing beyond. The soul bursts these barriers to set new limits, which in turn are good only for a time. Man must therefore keep himself always open to the conception of a larger circle. Let him 'prefer truth to his past ' apprehension of truth.'

How to seek truth is the subject of the next essay, 'Intellect,' a tribute to the spontaneous action of the mind. We do not control our thoughts but are controlled by them. All we can do is to clear away obstructions and suffer the 'intellect to see.' Pursue truth and it avoids you. Relax the energy of your pursuit and it comes to you; yet the pursuit was as necessary as the subsequent relaxation.

In the final essay, on Art,' the large, simple, and homely elements are praised, the qualities which appeal to universal human nature. In the paintings of the Old World one thinks to be astonished by something new and strange, and he is struck by the familiar look. He is reminded of what he had always known.

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The second series of Essays treats of 'The 'Poet,' Experience,' Character,' 'Manners,' Gifts,' 'Nature,' 'Politics,' of 'Nominalist and 'Realist;' there is also a lecture on New England 'Reformers.' Emerson notes the shallow nature of a theory of poetry busied only with externals. Neither is that poetry which is written at a safe 'distance from our own experience.' The The poet is

representative. 'He stands among common men 'for the complete man, and apprises us not of his 'wealth but of the commonwealth.'

'Experience' is in praise of a mode of life which consists in living without making a fuss about it, filling the time, taking hold where one can and exhausting the possibilities. Only fanatics. say it is not worth while. Let us be poised, and wise, ' and our own, to-day. Let us treat the men and 'women well; treat them as if they were real; per'haps they are.'

'Character' and 'Manners' are related studies. There is a moral order in the world. Nothing can withstand it. Character is this moral order seen 'through the medium of an individual nature.' Society has raised certain artificial distinctions. But they must be recognized. Society is real, and grows out of a genuine need. The painted phan'tasm Fashion casts a species of derision on what 'we say. But I will neither be driven from some 'allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, 'nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy.'

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'Gifts' is a fine bit of paradox. The gift, to 'be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. "When the waters are at level, then my goods pass 'to him, and his to me.' To give useful things denies the relation. Hence the fitness of beautiful things.

REPRESENTATIVE MEN

There is bold imagery in the essay on 'Nature.' 'Plants are the young of the world, but they grope ever upward toward consciousness; the 'trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan 'their imprisonment, rooted to the ground. The 'animal is the novice and probationer of a more 'advanced order. The men though young, hav'ing tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, 'are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are 'still uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come 'to consciousness they too will curse and swear.' Thus does Emerson describe that glimpse he had of a system in transition.'

A healthy optimism pervades the essay on 'Pol'itics.' In spite of meddling and selfishness the foundations of the State are very secure. Things ' have their laws, as well as men; and things re'fuse to be trifled with.' By a higher law property will be protected. The same necessity secures to each nation the form of governing best suited to it. Yet all forms are defective. Good men must 'not obey the laws too well.' Perfect government rests on character at last. There are dreamers who do not despair of seeing the State renovated on 'the principle of right and love.'

Representative Men consists of lectures on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, together with an introduction on the 'Uses of Great Men.'

Plato is the man who makes havoc with origi

nalities, the philosopher whose writings have been for twenty-two hundred years the Bible of the learned, but who has his defects. Intellectual in aim, and therefore literary, he attempts a system of the universe and fails to complete it or make it intelligible.

Swedenborg is the representative of mysticism, great with its power, weak with its defects.

Out of the eternal conflict between abstractionist and materialist arises another type of mind, one that laughs at both philosophies for being out of their depth and pushing too far. He is the sceptic, Montaigne, for example. The type was peculiarly grateful to Emerson, admiring as he did a man who talked with shrewdness, was not literary, who knew the world, used the positive degree, never shrieked, and had no wish to annihilate time and space.

Shakespeare meets our conception of the Poet, 'a heart in unison with his time and country,' whose production comes 'freighted with the 'weightiest convictions and pointed with the most 'determined aims which any man or class knows ' of in his times.' He demonstrated the possibility of translating things into song. The ear is ravished by the beauty of his lines, 'yet the sentence 'is so loaded with meaning and so linked with its 'foregoers and followers, that the logician is satis'fied.' And he had the royal trait of cheerfulness. In Napoleon we have the strong and ready

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