Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Guide to Emerson (1923).djvu/7

4 where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of Nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way. 'What is history,' said Napoleon, 'but a fable agreed upon?' This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands—the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras in my own mind."

Early in life Emerson was ordained a Unitarian minister; but his liberalism extended beyond the liberalism of that cult, and he left the pulpit.

He realized the independence that money brings—"If I were richer," he writes in his Journal of 1828, "I should lead a better life than I do. The chief advantages I should propose myself in wealth would be the independence of manner and conversation it would bestow, and which I eagerly covet."