cannot be taken, in all respects, as models for ministers in our days, who both want inspiration, and speak to orderly congregations, well instructed in the Christian religion, and listening with the utmost deference to their addresses. To read discourses may, therefore, be very natural and very appropriate in the latter, though in the former it would have been preposterous.

I am, &c.

MARTIN JONes.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

Emerson, the American Essayist, is the finest example of a literary hermit, abandoning social intercourse that he might have communion with nature as it lies undisturbed both without and within himself, and sheds forth its calm from star to flower, and from soul to sense. He has not fled to the wilderness to escape from persecution or detraction. He is no brother-exile to Lord Byron, or to Mr. Landor. He has chosen solitude-neither in the spirit of misanthropy, nor in the temper of chagrin and disappointment. His home is not like a corner of the world, where he may pout or rage, without being mocked or farther mortified, or injured afresh. In the maternal presence of nature, he has no complaint to make against absent brother-man. He carves no past wrongs of his on the trees of the mighty forests within which he has secluded himself. He flatters not mountains and vales, lakes and woods, by ridiculing bitterly the social scenes and phenomena which he has left behind. IIe frets not himself at the prosperity of the wicked and the foolish; he moralises not, in austere sullenness, over the vices and vanities of a city; he strives not to confirm and commend his own simple choice, by comparing it advantageously with the lot of life in a crowd of mean, deceitful, spiteful, and envious persons: and there is nothing of the harshness of a Diogenes about him, when he says, in the very poetry of contentment, "Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of Faerie : broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams!"""

He growls not from the "tub" upon the splendid presence of Alexander. Mr. Macaulay, somewhere, says smartly, that "an acre of Middlesex is better than an estate in Utopia;" but Emerson's transcendental dreams must be better than Utopian ones, for he who envies not the pomp of emperors, would not, surely, have a sick longing for an acre of Middlesex. Our late member must not have been in "health" on that "day" when he lost the Edinburgh election, otherwise he would have felt no regret !

Nor has Emerson made his retreat as an actor in the world, that he might become a spy or spectator of the world. He has not gone aside

into a quiet corner, that he might watch and report better what is doing in the centre of society. His tendency is to study the human species in the individual, and by thorough self-knowledge, he masters the secrets of humanity-past or present. Outsides such as either persons or events have no interest to him; all that is sensuous in life he overlooks, and it is the inner nature, the pure spiritualism of man, about which he is at all inquisitive. He is, therefore, quite indifferent as to what external point of view he may occupy. Place him at the door of a cottage, within which some domestic tragedy is in progress, and he would gain the object of his study as truly as if you took him to the scene of the French Revolution. It is naked and essential humanity which he aims to know and describe. In this respect, how unlike is he to Thomas Carlyle, who chiefly learns from pictures, and chiefly teaches by pictures! Carlyle has confessed that when he was engaged lately in arranging Cromwell's "Letters" for publication, he was im patient and restless until he had procured some original portrait of his hero, about which he had heard, and declares that the painter's art enabled him to form and give forth a more vivid idea. But Emerson rejects whatever can be called pictorial, he goes straight to the bosom of humanity, and cares not for looks or attitudes, words or deeds. What has he to do with Napoleon Buonparte's face and dress, or even his battles? Indeed, it is seldom that he will examine this or that man, this or that fact, in any of their outward aspects and features at all. He has a special contempt for what Americans phrase “great facts," and may, it is likely, be ignorant of the war which his native country has been carrying on with Mexico. Emerson did not, then, go into solitude that, away from the bustle and commotion, he might watch over the movements of the world, and behind the foliage and screen of forests, note the external characteristics of the age. He himself says: "There is one mind common to all individual men. Who hath access to this universal mind, is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. A man is the whole encyclopædia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn; and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world. Then, if the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual mind is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him." Thus, his own soul supplies him with the whole possible history of mankind. "The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious. There is at the surface infinite variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity and unity of cause. Why, being as we are surrounded by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, should we be

such hard pedants and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of form? The soul knows them not." Emerson would not take a single step into town or country, to view the outside, however picturesque, of human nature.

And what is most peculiar and wonderful of all, this enthusiast has not taken up his abode in solitude, that he might be at leisure to carry on ambitious literary projects. He entered his retreat from no such motives as led Wordsworth and Southey to their respective cottages near the Lakes, or as drew Foster up to his garret. Emerson went from the city, simply that he might grow in all his spiritual nature as a man, and not that he might lay the materials for future renown by cultivating himself as an artist. He wished his soul day by day to become more divine, and to be more healthy, peaceful, and wise, and not to address itself to some achievement, which the world, through all the ages, might applaud. He would not use the glorious sun, only as a lamp over his manuscript, to guide his toiling pen; nor would he sit down in the free and beautiful country, as if it were merely a study, in which he might write. How bitterly would he scorn night-vigils, protracted until taper and sense went alike out, and the freshness of the dawn was lost upon the exhausted brain,-night-vigils, all spent for the sake of paltry honours, and not for the sake of fuller, sweeter, more celestial life to the soul! We cannot imagine Emerson violating the "Method of Nature," by reading and writing night and day, till death sets free the drooping and worn-out soul, merely for reputation in college or country. Not that he would shrink from bodily sacrifice, not that he would nurse and cherish his "flesh," so very religiously and tenderly, but he would disdain thus to impoverish, degrade, and enslave his spirit. He has no sympathy with Henry Kirke White, or such students. For him to think and to feel in high and constant harmony with nature, is far more necessary and glorious than to compose literary pieces. He speaks scornfully of the works of the soul, "Converse," he says, compared with the life of the soul. with a mind grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching." "Better," he also affirms, "that the book should not be quite so good, and the book-maker abler and better." Yet the problem of most of our intellectual men seems to be-a soul to be put upon paper, and transmuted into literature. But what account is made of the growth of the soul? The soul and hand-action and meditation are thus abject slaves to the pen, and have ceased to be masters of themselves;-their wages are a breath of fame! What a pointed and severe rebuke does Emerson's example administer to many men of genius, who keep tasking the soul with constant labour, as if there were to be no future life for the soul; or as if the soul's chief intellectual duty were not to build itself up, silently and gradually, into manhood. Emerson did not seek solitude as affording leisure for attending to deeds of glory. "Why," he asks," should we be cowed by the name of action? The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is nature. To think is to act." Dickens would go to Niagara, or to Vesuvius, that he might describe these natural wonders, and not that he might be impressed and improved by their moral; and when we hear of him quitting London for some still

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and sequestered abode, we shall conclude that he is about to compose a longer and a more complicated novel than usual. What a mean thing is the soul-when it becomes professionally and exclusively literary! "Much of the wisdom of the world," Emerson remarks, is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease." This subject suggests to us an idea which never crossed our mind before. Whilst anxious that the advantages of a thorough education should be extended to men of every class, and impatient for the coming of this era, we yet are led to apprehend, with some little melancholy, that if profound knowledge were universal, then mechanical and menial toil would be at an end, and "the hewers of wood and drawers of water" to society would forthwith abandon their humble employments-no longer felt to be congenial. May not this apprehension have arisen from the fact, that hitherto, the mind, when trained and strengthened, has devoted itself to the reading and writing of books, more than to quiet observation and meditation? Let Emerson's habits be adopted by authors and other educated men, let the important truth be received and acted upon, that the growth of the soul is man's grand and first intellectual duty-a duty to be attended to constantly, and with the silence of an earnest pupil ;-and there will be no danger of society being disorganized by the march of the noblest education through all the ranks of our people.

We repeat our opening remark, that Emerson is the finest example of a literary hermit. Such a hermit, it is plain, must be an idealist. Common eye-sight and day-light must not be his faculty and means of observation. To dispense with men, he must appreciate and know man; and in the companionless forest, the humanity within himself must be communed with as a universal type, and a sufficient oracle. To make nothing of outward things, to refuse to dwell for a moment on the bodies of men, to take no account of the and to overlook facts, whether national or individual, proves that he is

bent on

"human face divine,"

reaching the naked soul, and that he will exchange words with deputy. And how singularly free must all his studies

no servant or

be from vulgar motives! To write a successful and much admired book, to be named as a great author by several generations, is to hinf

pitiful ambition. He would rather stroll through the woods, feeding and invigorating his soul, though not one of the thousand fancies which bless him, can be recorded, than confine himself to his desk and labour hard to fill some pages with words which may be quoted and praised by the public. Why should the child of nature spend all his time in toiling, rather than in simply growing? We wish that

our

well-known writers would adopt this really common sense, though apparently transcendental, view. Would it not be unspeakably better for them to allow their souls to grow-rather than to force them prematurely and unceasingly down to a day and night slavery in the pro duction of books? Were souls given merely to lay hold of and ani

C

mate language-whether written or spoken? Emerson does not feel that being endowed with genius, he must, therefore, take up a pen and go on inditing. He emphatically believes and preaches, that "common souls pay with what they do; nobler souls with that which they are." A day spent in reclining under the shade of a tree, and an evening consecrated to a quiet musing on the stars, may be far more noble and profitable than if all the hours had been given to resolute reading or writing. "If," says Emerson, "man listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of his house; he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears. His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience and omnipresence. It is sublime to receive, but this lust of imparting as from us, comes of a lower strain."

Emerson entertains as thorough a contempt for the mere working scholar, as the worldly-minded merchant can. He is a transcendentalist distinguished for sound common sense.

It is truly strange that the birth-place of such a man should have been in America. His own people have not appreciated him, his fame will grow more slowly at home than any where else; but indeed we cannot believe that they were his own. We should not have thought that there was enough of spiritualism floating about over the new world to have produced, even on condensation, such a mind as Emerson's. The "go-a-head" tendency was supreme and exclusive. America is the country, where sheer common sense is impassioned and ardent as poetry. Her mechanical and practical character is as much inflamed as if it were a wildly imaginative one; and our ideal of America was the perfection of animal energy and of mechanical power. Yet Emerson was born there. A Greek of Greeks he might have been, and yet he was a Yankee, cradled and reared in Boston. Save for a certain manner of rigid and harsh independence which he occasionally manifests, his might have been the plastic soul of that land whose very marble, at the artist's touch, awoke from cold stiffness and inanimation, and if it did not move, at least slept and dreamed, like life in the air of beauty. We grieve sincerely at being compelled to add, that as Emerson might have been a native of ancient Greece, from his whole nature being wrapt in poetic ecstacy, so he might have been a native of ancient Greece, from his ignorance of Christianity, or from his treating it as "foolishness;" and Mars' Hill did not hold one Athenian philosopher, who needed more the inimitable preaching of St. Paul, than does this American in the nineteenth century.

The literary hermit, at long intervals, comes out of his retirement to deliver lectures to Societies in Boston: and so fascinating is his