Page:The Dial- a monthly magazine for literature, philosophy and religion 1.djvu/778

778

Having been kindly furnished, in advance, with sheets of this work, we can give our readers promise of a rare delight.

After having the spell cast by this book broken by the only ugly words in it, "," — we fastened even on these two, and they seemed to be a mystic key, fitting each link that bound us. Emerson's power seems to be in his method; and this lies in his reporting "the end," or flower, in which each thing culminates. However clamorous the festooners are for leayes and buds, he will not touch his growths until the last purpling touch of sun or frost has been garnered in flower or cluster. Not a sip of grapy wine, eyen, will he give us, — if one sun-beam or dew-drop of its vintage fails to sparkle in the cup, it must wait its century in the cellar. Provoking as this is to our fast age, it is plainly necessary to the "ministry of reconciliation," to Poet, Seer, and Sage. These bringing the "flower of the mind," must deal with flowers of things; under the sod, root strives with root, but all their blossoms harmonize in the vase of poetry. With the Poet, the Seer of Unity, the New Genesis begins, and the Garden of God reappears, where the lion and the lamb strive not, for the new-born child leads them. As thorns are characteristic of stems, not blooms, so are the antagonisms of the world, and of thought, mere indications that the petals, which carry the eye beyond stems, are yet unopened. The antagonism without is counterpart of that within. The mass of men going into the park, and seeing the waters of a fountain, now leaping high into the air, now precipitated into the basin below, conclude that there are two Laws at work; at length they find that one Law uplifts and casts down the jet. But it must be long ere the hint gets translated into the world of vital antagonisms; long, ere from the realms of God and Evil, Actual and Ideal, Sin and Virtue, the kneeling worshippers shall cry,
 * ^ The darkness and the light are both alike to Thee!"

This, then, is Emerson's Method: seeing that statements pressed very far seem to exclude others, logicians hurry back, and "hide behind a tomb;" but our Sage has read too far for that, — he presses them still farther, and finds that they include all the other sides, when they too art pressed to their largest remits. Like a trained naturalist, who, plucking a grass, should read what stratum, and fossils, and metals were beneath his feet, and what beasts around, and where the isothermal line lay, — Emer- son performs miracles of simplicity; shows Luther and the Pope twining the same thread, each at his end, and he does not care to conceal how, as an idealist, he must sketch on a back-ground of materialism. He is an Antimonian in "Fate," an Arminian in "Power;" in " Wealth" we seethe head whose range

in "Culture," the great value of quantity,—in "Behavior," of quality. And then in the Chapters on "Worship," "Considerations by the Way," and "Beauty," the eternal Sea, toward which we had been drifting on all the streams, breaks on our vision, and the thunder-roll of its waves is in our ears: then toil no more at the oars, mariners! Qua cursum ventus.

.—An admirable likeness of him may be found at Wiswell's. It was modeled by Carew, of Cambridge, and is of raised sil- ver, so wrought as to be purer than marble. As a specimen of a new and beautiful art, it should be seen; by those who wish a true potrait, it should be owned. These are both elegant and cheap.