inevitable conclusion that either he is crazy or we, on the other hand he regenerates our faith, by giving us an original testimony to great truths. Thus, his essay on The OverSoul, notwithstanding its unscriptural title, is as orthodox as St. Paul.

Whatever appearances there may be to the contrary, Mr. Emerson is no destructive. He is a builder, a born and anointed poet. His demand is Truth. He must stand face to face with the Absolute. Insatiable as is his craving for truth, he is always orderly and serene. He gives no sign that any deterring considerations have ever occurred to him. Whatever suggestions of fear or policy there may be, they are less than cobwebs to him. They cannot impede, they do not even tease him. He is as selfpossessed and assured as if he carried in his pocket a commission, signed and sealed of all mankind, to say just the thing that he is saying. Mr. Emerson is never commonplace. Hence we infer that he is a genuine worker. He cannot, like a host of others, write in his sleep. Every thing is wrought out by his own thought. I have sometimes fancied that he must, in his listless moments, repine at the stubbornness of his genius, which can bear to be mute, but which cannot declaim, nor tolerate in him any attempt at "fine writing." There is a very common talent, passing for a great deal more than it is worth, the sole talent of many quite distinguished writers,-which lies in the putting of words together so fitly and musically that they seem to sing a new truth, when it is "an old song," with no variations. Mr. Emerson is utterly deficient in this power. He cannot juggle with words. He has no bank-notes: nothing but bullion. If he states an old and world-known truth, he does it with that felicity of expression which gives us a fresh sense of its value, and we confess that the same thing was never before so well said. He fits his word to his thought, consulting no ear but his own.

In reading Mr. Emerson's works we must observe Coleridge's admirable rule: "When you cannot understand an author's ignorance, account yourself ignorant of his understanding." At the slightest glance we shall find here and there in them much to inspire respect for his sagacity and admiration for his genius. When therefore he seems to be unintelligible, or absurd, modesty dictates that we should at least entertain the question whether the defect

be in him or us. If we cannot explain his ignorance, we shall do wisely to distrust our own understanding. It is possible, nay, it is in a very high degree probable, not only that he really has a meaning, but that he has a very good and a very great meaning, and that he has expressed it in the very best form, so that, were we as keen-sighted as he, we should recognise the beauty both of the thought and the expression. An ingenious friend and admirer of Mr. Emerson, a few years since, put forth some very amusing pencil sketches illustrative of his hard sayings. They were caricatures, it is true; but they implied a great compliment. How many of our writers of established fame use language sufficiently picturesque to admit of such illustrations?

-In connection with the opposition to the old school of metaphysics may be mentioned Doctor Walker, the Professor of Philosophy in Harvard University; the Reverend Theodore Parker, and the Reverend William B. Greene. Doctor Walker delivered in Boston a few years ago three series of lectures on Natural Religion, in which he steered between the extremes of both parties, confined himself to no particular system, but in his general principles coincided very nearly with Cousin, as modified by Jouffroy. Mr. Parker may also be classed with the school of Cousin, but his metaphysics are confusedly blended with radical notions regarding government, and heretical notions regarding religion,―a kind of aggregation in one mind of what is most offensive in the different French and German schools. Mr. Greene is a powerful and original thinker, with no other point of agreement with the transcendentalists than the negative one of rejection of Locke.

Opposed to all these is Mr. Bowen, the wellknown editor of the North American Review, who hates transcendentalism in all its forms, deeming it, as developed in New England, a monstrosity, made up of cant, sentimentalism, and unreason. A receiver of the general principles of Locke, as modified by the progress of philosophical discovery, he enforces them with great energy and determination. Though I dissent from many of his opinions, and question the validity of his positions, I still think that his disquisitions evince a strength, breadth, and acuteness of understanding, a knowledge of his subjects, and a directness of style which place them very high among American contri butions to the science of metaphysics.

BEAUTY.

FROM NATURE.

THE presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will, and never separate. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do; but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. 66 All those things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;" said an ancient historian. The winds and waves," said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is done,-perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopyla; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of America;-before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, "You never sate on so glorious a seat." Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. "But," to use the simple narrative of his biographer, "the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side." In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere.

POETRY AND NATURE.

FROM LITERARY ETHICS.

Br Latin and English poetry, we were born and bred in an oratorio of praises of nature, flowers, birds, mountains, sun, and moon; yet the naturalist of this hour finds that he knows nothing, by all their poems, of any of these fine things; that he has conversed with the merest surface and show of them all and of their essence, or of their history, knows nothing. Further inquiry will discover that nobody,-that not these chanting poets themselves, knew any thing sincere of these handsome natures they so commended; that they contented themselves with the passing chirp of a bird that they saw one or two mornings, and listlessly looked at sunsets, and repeated idly these few glimpses in their song. But, go into the forest, you shall find all new and undescribed. The screaming of the wild geese, flying by night; the thin note of the companionable titmouse, in the winter day; the fall of swarms of flies in autumn, from combats high in the air, pattering down on the leaves like rain; the angry hiss of the wood-birds; the pine throwing out its pollen for the benefit of the next century; the turpentine exuding from the tree-and, indeed, any vegetation-any animation, any and all are alike unattempted. The man who stands on the sea-shore, or who rambles in the woods, seems to be the first man that ever stood on the shore, or entered a grove, his sensations and his world are so novel and strange. Whilst I read the poets, I think that nothing new can be said about morning and evening; but when I see the daybreak, I am not reminded of these Homeric, or Shakspearian, or Miltonic, or Chaucerian pictures. No; but I feel, perhaps, the pain of an alien world,-a world not yet subdued by the thought; or, I am cheered by the moist, warm, glittering, budding, melodious hour, that takes down the narrow walls of my soul, and extends its life and pulsation to the very horizon. That is morning, to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as nature.

The noonday darkness of the American forest, the deep, echoing, aboriginal woods, where the liv ing columns of the oak and fir tower up from the ruins of the trees of the last millennium; where, from year to year, the eagle and the crow see no intruder; the pines, bearded with savage moss, yet touched with grace by the violets at their feet; the broad, cold lowland, which forms its coat of vapour with the stillness of subterranean crystallization; and where the traveller, amid the repulsive plants that are native in the swamp, thinks with pleasing terror of the distant town; this beauty,-haggard and desert beauty, which the sun and the moon, the snow and the rain repaint and vary, has never been recorded by art, yet is not indifferent to any passenger. All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes. What mean these journeys to Niagara; these pilgrims to the White Hills? Men believe in the adaptations of utility, always. In the mountains, they may believe in the adaptations