Morning journal and courier., 1882-04-29
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

So great man as Emerson needs to be un- derstood, which is finer justice and far great CT praise than all eloquent admiration for his life and work can be, or gentle mourning over the termination of his physical life ought to be- Nor will it do to pronounce him our greatest philosopher or our pro foundest thinker, for true though 1t be it might forsooth be slight praise and insuff- cient. One might reduce his essays and poems to summaries, and classify these as ethical philosophical, poetical, social and practical. But this catalogue would be an impertinence. MT. Emerson never under took to enlarge the field of knowledge or to rearrange it under more suitable aspects. He IS not merely storehouse of knowledge, an encyclopaedia, guide to wisdom, and phi Iosopher. He is a fresh, cool fountain from which one may draw indefinitely for the health and comfort of ones mind. and 1t is for this reason that he is studied most and best when men and women of mind pass through a crisis, leaving conyentionality be- hind and trying hardest to get at the real truth of life and all it's overpowering signif canoe. Hence Emerson forms an epoch in so many lives which turn to him as the Ger mans turn to the first part of Faust, and all readers of English to the Prince of Denmark When Emerson entered the world with his Nature" his American Scholar and his lectures gray men were puzzled. but their children understood the sage seer, and where they did not understand they were yet sure of profit, help and inspiration.
 Mir. Emerson is probably the most philo- sephical mind and temper of this century, though he never reached the supreme rest of the solitary giant Spinoza, and cannot be ranked among the professed philosophers like Fichte and Herbert Spencer, who made systems that reproduce the cosmos or fair world on a reduced scale. But Mir Emerson did much better work, for he drew as it were the quintessence and very spirit out of God s world, and gave it freely, lavishly, exultingly to all corners. Hence it is idle to read him with the intellect alone, or with reason alone, or with the emotions, or with sweet imagi- nation He is more substantial than all that, and tho whole reader must surrender to his pages or he will fail to get all that Is there. For the same reason, neither the poet alone, nor the philosopher alone, nor the man of the world alone, and least of all the analyist alone, can do Emerson justice, try him as he may, for the philosophical reader is suddenly carried away by a graceful fancy, and the poet confounded by dry remark on busi- ness, while the poor analyst is mocked and laughed at as would be the chemist who un- dertook to analyze the flavor of the violet and reduce it to formula There is more in En- erson than truth, fancy, profundity and dar- ing courage; he has life, nature, mind, and
 
 a measure of the world, nor have we begun to reach the whole of truth or the sum total of what is in nature in life and in ourselves. reader familiar with Emerson might go on almost indefinitely, remark that he must be read synthetically, not analytically, pre- cisely as good fruit should be eaten, and not cut with an iron knife, or talked about. The system makers and the methodieal people might be warned not to classify Emerson, to lo al h tC ard, be it critical or intuitive. And yet he IS neither a mere phenomenon that appears and vanishes like q meteor or comet, nor simply @ noumenon,-a riddle that deteS oE intelll gence and refuses to answer our longing questions. He is, to the contrary, the legiti- mate outcome of antecedent causes, of his environment, of his own will and work, and, in word, great literary character, hardly less the creator than the creature of his time, his country and his birthplace, Boston. Viewed historically and Geographically, the great author-the greatest 1n our natlo na 1 literature-becomes at once harmonious and like stream of which we know the origin | the course of youth, the rich progress oi deep and calm fullness, and now the end in | the ocean of eternity. But Is it the end | Can Emerson be dead Mind Is imperish able there is nothing greater than mind, an6 | Emerson is the greatest mind of eur history | and country.
 child of Boston, which he loved so well and of Unitarian parents whom he vener ated with filial piety, he drank well from th' | spirit of his surroundings, from Harvard, anC from literature; for 8 while he occupied { pulpit, but found it too narrow, not because any man is too great for the pulpit, but be cause he desired more freedom than ht thought it right to expect from salariet office and social traditions. Then he retired to Concord, and his -diligent labors II literature, half yielding to Coleridge, hailne Carlyle, and embracing transcendental1sm not, however, because these were the bes things to be had, but because Mir. Emerson knew that his sources of strength ought moi to be limited by conventionality, by the as pirations of the great and good, or even b. his own prophetic soul. He would not joil a school, an intellectual aristocracy, philo sophical set, or any group, however much o honor and comfort it offered. Hence he i not the property of any class, but our com mon possession and our national glory whose words read like the great ledger entrie of our merchants, whose acts betray tn shrewdness and prudence of the typical Ne1 Englander, and whose words are the outcom of our national development,-our joy, ou honor, and withal part of every fine Amer