be immortal if that be best. Whether we shall know each other again is a Sunday-school question. He will not spend his time about it. Perhaps, as he says of Carlyle, this nimble and active spirit does not care to beat itself against walls. But he is not, like Carlyle, a destroyer or a scorner. He worships no demon of mere force. If he does not know what we long to know of another world, he pays due homage to the loving and wise Spirit that sitteth as Sovereign on the throne of this. Rather he believes that the world is but one world, and that the Sovereign who reigns over it never to be dethroned knows very well

that every road leads to the gates of His Kingdom. He sees no God of force or of disdain looking down on mankind as on a race of grovelling swine or chattering apes. For myself, I never read what Emerson says about Immortality, or think of him as thinking about it, without summing it all up in Addison's noble line,

"The Soul, secure in her existence, smiles."

When Emerson first uttered his grave and cheerful voice, there still echoed in the ear of mankind the cry of disdain inspired by the diseased brain of Carlyle, when he imagined the serene and silent stars looking down from their eternal solitudes on the varied occupations of men. "What thinks Boötes of them as he leads his hunting-dogs across the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?" What thinks Boötes of them? Boötes is but a few specks of shining dust,

glistening with putrescent light, save as he is clothed with beauty and with glory in the conscious soul of man. The only thing in the world, under Him who made it, that can ever be truly an object of reverence is a human soul subjecting itself, of its own volition, to a law higher than its own desire. The answer to the seer of the old world came from the seer of the new;

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,'
The youth replies, ‘I can.””

Nothing could be more unbecoming than to speak irreverently of Carlyle while we are doing homage to Emerson. Emerson stood loyally by his friends, by that friend most loyally of all. Among Carlyle's chief titles to remembrance by posterity will be Emerson's certificate.

Still, Emerson, though his lover and admirer, admits that Carlyle reminds him of a sick giant. Carlyle is a hater of evil. He stands for honesty and righteousness. He finds them hardly anywhere, and finds them least of all in the men who are most eager in trying to attain unto them. Until honesty and righteousness come to the throne — which Carlyle does not expect to happen in his time -he proposes to maintain and to obey an ad interim Sovereign, who is nothing but a poor and commonplace tyrant.

Jowett well said of him that he was a man with

out admiration of any active goodness; he expressed his own personal fancies in the likeness of intellectual truths, and that if he, himself, were engaged in any work more than usually good, Carlyle would be the first person to utter a powerful sneer, and if he were seeking to know the truth, Carlyle would ridicule the notion of a homunculus discovering the truth.

Wordsworth said truly of Carlyle that he defied all sympathy. And he said truly of the Carlyle temper:

"That pride,

How e'er disguised in its own majesty,

Is littleness; that he who feels contempt

For any living thing hath faculties

That he has never used, that thought with him,

Is in its infancy."

He seemed to despise every good man. He was essentially a scorner, and the lash of his scorn fell upon good men; and his homage, which he rarely gave, was given, in general, to bad men. However we may be dazzled by Carlyle, our fixed star will be shining in the sky when this meteor is gone. If we may trust our seer when he tells us that evil is temporary and perishable, and that

"What is excellent,

As God lives, is permanent,"

then the function of the destroyer of evil is perishable and temporary also.

Mr. Emerson's philosophy had no Stoicism in it.

If it brought him ampler compensations than were vouchsafed to common men, grief also filled to its depths a larger heart, and touched with its agony nerves more finely sensitive than those of common men. Who has uttered, like him, in that immortal "Threnody," the voice of parental sorrow? What more loving heart ever mourned the loss of a brother's love than that which could not be unlocked because the key had gone with Charles and Edward? I remember, as if it were yesterday, that winter morning in my early youth, when the messenger came to my father's door before sunrise, bearing his written message to one of the household, "Everything wakes this morning, except my darling boy." The noblest emotions of the soul are nobler to us that they have moved him.

I have spoken very imperfectly of a part only of the messages Emerson brought to us. Now, it is not enough for our purpose that the intellect should see these things. Men do not like skeletons or anatomies. And they do not like cold. These things must come to us, if they are to be living truths for us, clothed and apparelled in regal splendor; adorned and wreathed with flowers and branches; made sweet and tender by the graces of poetry; made musical with rhythm and verse. They must be spoken by eloquent lips, and the soul must be opened to receive them by the glance of the eye, and the tone of the voice, and the flush of the cheek, of the prophet who utters them.

We who are the survivors of that generation, and

who dwelt in the town of his home, enjoyed that privilege also. I do not know how others may feel. But I would not be without that sweet and tender memory of the voice whose words yet linger in my ear, "nestling," as Lowell says, " in the ear, because of their music, and in the heart, because of their meaning," to have heard Demosthenes speak from the Bema, or Plato in the Academy.

To cite the tributes of eminent authorities to the great place of Mr. Emerson in literature, and his trustworthiness as an intellectual and spiritual guide, would occupy not only the day but the year. We cannot undertake to do that. But we ought to be certain that we are not induced by our love for our delightful friend and townsman to confound our own narrow field of vision with that of all mankind especially with that of posterity. Yet that must be a fixed star of the first magnitude, of whom observers, whose stations are apart by the distance of the whole heavens, concur in so reporting. When the Jew, and the Catholic, and the Unitarian, and the Anglican, and the Calvinist, and the Sceptic; when the Russian, and the German, and the Scotsman, concur with his own countrymen in their estimate of a religious teacher, we may fairly believe that we have got the verdict not of the year or of the generation only, but of the centuries.

I received the other day a letter from an accomplished Jew containing a paper he had written upon Emerson. In it he says, "Emerson's hold on the