Emerson was so drawn to the racy and original that it seems as if original sin had a certain fascination for him. The austere, the Puritanical Emerson, the heir of eight generations of clergy-men, the man who did not like to have Frederika Bremer play the piano in his house on Sunday, seems at times to covet the "swear-words" of the common people. They itch at his ears, they have flavor and reality.

He sometimes records them in his Journal; for example, this remark of the Canadian wood-chopper who cut wood for his neighbor-he preferred to work by the job rather than by the day-the days were "so damned long!"

The mob, Emerson says, is always interesting: "A blacksmith, a truckman, a farmer, we follow into the bar-room and watch with eagerness what they shall say." "Cannot the stinging dialect of the sailor be domesticated?" "My page about Consistency would be better written, 'Damn Consistency.'" But try to fancy Emerson swearing like the men on the street! Once only he swore a sacred oath, and that he himself records: it was called out by the famous, and infamous, Fugitive Slave Law which made every Northern man hound and huntsman for the Southern slave-driver. "This filthy enactment," he says, "was made in the Nineteenth Century by men who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God!"

Evidently the best thing the laboring people had to offer Emerson was their racy and characteristic speech. When one of his former neighbors said of an eclipse of the sun that it looked as if a "nigger" was poking his head into the sun, Emerson recorded it in his Journal. His son reports that Emerson enjoyed the talk of the stable-men and used to tell their anecdotes and boasts of their horses when he came home; for example, "In the stable you'd take him for a slouch, but lead him to the door, and when he lifts up his eyes, and looks abroad,-by thunder! you'd think the sky was all horse." Such surprises and exaggerations always attracted him, unless they took a turn that made him laugh. He loved wit with the laugh taken out of it. The genial smile and not uproarious laughter suited his mood best.

He was a lover of quiet, twinkling humor. Such humor gleams out often in his Journal. It gleams in this passage about Dr. Ripley: "Dr. Ripley prays for rain with great explicitness on Sunday, and on Monday the showers fell. When I spoke of the speed with which his prayers were answered, the good man looked modest." There is another prayer-for-rain story that he enjoys telling: "Dr. Allyne, of Duxbury, prayed for rain, at church. In the afternoon the boys carried umbrellas. 'Why?' 'Because you prayed for rain.' 'Pooh! boys! we always pray for rain: it's customary.'"

At West Point he asked a lieutenant if they had morning prayers at college. "We have reveillé beat, which is the same thing."

He tells with relish the story of a German who went to hire a horse and chaise at a stable in Cambridge. "Shall I put in a buffalo?" inquired the livery-man. "My God! no," cried the astonished German, "put in a horse."

Emerson, I am sure, takes pleasure in relating a characteristic story of Dr. Ripley and a thunder-shower: "One August afternoon, when I was in the hayfield helping him with his man to rake up his hay, I well remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky when the thunder gust was coming up to spoil the hay. He raked very fast, then looked at the clouds and said, 'We are in the Lord's hands, mind your rake, George! we are in the Lord's hands,' and seemed to say, 'You know me, the field is mine-Dr. Ripley's-thine own servant.'"

The stories Emerson delighted in were all rich in this quiet humor. I heard of one he used to tell about a man who, when he went to his club at night, often lingered too long over his cups, and came home befuddled in the small hours, and was frequently hauled over the coals by his wife. One night he again came home late, and was greeted with the usual upbraiding in the morning. "It was not late," he said, "it was only one o'clock." "It was much later than that," said the wife. "It was one o'clock," repeated the man; "I heard it strike one three or four times!"

Another good Emersonian story, though I do not know that he ever heard it, is that of an old woman who had a farm in Indiana near the Michigan line. The line was resurveyed, and the authorities set her farm in Michigan. The old lady protested-she said it was all she could do to stand the winters of Indiana, she could never stand those of Michigan!

Cannot one see a twinkle in Emerson's eye when he quotes his wife as saying that "it is wicked to go to church on Sunday"? Emerson's son records that his father hated to be made to laugh, as he could not command his face well. Hence he evidently notes with approval another remark of his wife's: "A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults." What he thought of the loud, surprising laugh with which Carlyle often ended his bitter sentences, I do not know that he records. Its meaning to Carlyle was evidently, "Oh! what does it all matter?" If Emerson himself did not smile when he wrote the sentence about "a maiden so pure that she exchanged glances only with the stars," his reader, I am sure, will.

Emerson evidently enjoyed such a story as this which was told him by a bishop: There was a dispute in a vestry at Providence between two hot church-members. One said at last, "I should like to know who you are"-

"Who I am?" cried the other,-"who I am! I am a humble Christian, you damned old heathen, you!"

The minister whom he heard say that "nobody enjoyed religion less than ministers, as none enjoyed food so little as cooks," must have provoked the broadest kind of a smile.

Although one of Emerson's central themes in his Journals was his thought about God, or his feeling for the Infinite, he never succeeded in formulating his ideas on the subject and could not say what God is or is not. At the age of twenty-one he wrote in his Journal, "I know that I know next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very promising frame of mind for a young man. "It is not certain that God exists, but that He does not is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera."

A little later he wrote: "The government of God is not a plan-that would be Destiny, [or we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore."

He quotes this from Plotinus: "Of the Unity of God, nothing can be predicated, neither being, nor essence, nor life, for it is above all these."

It was a bold saying of his that "God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religion."

"A great deal of God in the universe," he says, "but not available to us until we can make it up into a man."

But if asked, what makes it up into a man? why does it take this form? he would have been hard put to it for an answer.

Persons who assume to know all about God, as if He lived just around the corner, as Matthew Arnold said, will not find much comfort in Emerson's uncertainty and blind groping for adequate expression concerning Him. How can we put the All, the Eternal, in words? How can we define the Infinite without self-contradiction? Our minds are cast in the mould of the finite; our language is fashioned from our dealings with a world of boundaries and limitations and concrete objects and forces. How much can it serve us in dealing with a world of opposite kind-with the Whole, the Immeasurable, the Omnipresent, and Omnipotent? Of what use are our sounding-lines in a bottomless sea? How are we to apply our conceptions of personality to the all-life, to that which transcends all limitations, to that which is everywhere and yet nowhere? Shall we assign a local habitation and a name to the universal energy? As the sunlight puts out our lamp or candle, so our mental lights grow pale in the presence of the Infinite Light. We can deal with the solid bodies on the surface of the earth, but the earth as a sphere in the heavens baffles us. All our terms of over and under, up and down, east and west, and the like, fail us. You may go westward around the world and return to your own door coming from the east. The circle is a perpetual contradiction, the sphere a surface without boundaries, a mass without weight. When we ascribe weight to the earth, we are trying it by the standards of bodies on its surface-the pull of the earth is the measure of their weight; but the earth itself-what pulls that? Only some larger body can pull that, and the adjustment of the system is such that the centripetal and centrifugal forces balance each other, and the globes float as lightly as any feather.

Emerson said he denied personality to God because it is too little, not too much. If you ascribe personality to God, it is perfectly fair to pester you with questions about Him. Where is He? How long has He been there? What does He do? Personality without place, or form, or substance, or limitation is a contradiction of terms. We are the victims of words. We get a name for a thing and then invent the thing that fits it. All our names for the human faculties, as the will, the reason, the understanding, the imagination, conscience, instincts, and so on, are arbitrary divisions of a whole, to suit our own convenience, like the days of the week, or the seasons of the year. Out of unity we make diversity for purposes of our practical needs. Thought tends to the one, action to the many. We must have small change for everything in the universe, because our lives are made up of small things. We must break wholes up into fractions, and then seek their common multiple. Only thus can we deal with them. We deal with God by limiting Him and breaking Him up into his attributes, or by conceiving Him under the figure of the Trinity. He is thus less baffling to us. We can handle Him the better. We make a huge man of Him and then try to dodge the consequences of our own limitations.

All these baffling questions pressed hard upon Emerson. He could not do without God in nature, and yet, like most of us, he could not justify himself until he had trimmed and cut away a part of nature. God is the All, but the All is a hard mass to digest. It means hell as well as heaven, demon as well as seraph, geology as well as biology, devolution as well as evolution, earthquake as well as earth tranquillity, cyclones as well as summer breezes, the jungle as well as the household, pain as well as pleasure, death as well as life. How are you to reconcile all these contradictions?

Emerson said that nature was a swamp with flowers and birds on the borders, and terrible things in the interior. Shall we have one God for the fair things, and another God for the terrible things?

"Nature is saturated with deity," he says, the terrific things as the beatific, I suppose. "A great deal of God in the universe," he again says, "but not valuable to us till we can make it up into a man." And when we make it up into a man we have got a true compendium of nature; all the terrific and unholy elements-fangs and poisons and eruptions, sharks and serpents-have each and all contributed something to the make-up. Man is nature incarnated, no better, no worse.

But the majority of mankind who take any interest in the God-question at all will probably always think of the Eternal in terms of man, and endow Him with personality.

One feels like combating some of Emerson's conclusions, or, at least, like discounting them. His refusal to see any value in natural science as such, I think, shows his limitations. "Natural history," he says, "by itself has no value; it is like a single sex; but marry it to human history and it is poetry. Whole Floras, all Linn?us', and Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry." Of course he speaks for himself. Natural facts, scientific truth, as such, had no interest to him. One almost feels as if this were idealism gone to seed.

"Shall I say that the use of Natural Science seems merely 'ancillary' to Morals? I would learn the law of the defraction of a ray because when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new truth in ethics." Is the ethical and poetic value of the natural sciences, then, their main or only value to the lay mind? Their technical details, their tables and formul? and measurements, we may pass by, but the natural truths they disclose are of interest to the healthy mind for their own sake. It is not the ethics of chemical reactions and combinations-if there be ethics in them-that arrests our attention, but the light they throw on the problem of how the world was made, and how our own lives go on. The method of Nature in the physical world no doubt affords clues to the method of Nature in the non-physical, or supersensuous world. But apart from that, it is incredible that a mind like Emerson's took no interest in natural knowledge for its own sake. The fact that two visible and inodorous gases like hydrogen and oxygen-one combustible and the other the supporter of combustion-when chemically combined produce water, which extinguishes fire, is intensely interesting as affording us a glimpse of the contradictions and paradoxes that abound everywhere in Nature's methods. If there is any ethics or any poetry in it, let him have it who can extract it. The great facts of nature, such as the sphericity of the cosmic bodies, their circular motions, their mutual interdependence, the unprovable ether in which they float, the blue dome of the sky, the master currents of the ocean, the primary and the secondary rocks, have an intellectual value, but how they in any way illustrate the moral law is hard to see. The ethics, or right and wrong, of attraction and repulsion, of positive and negative, have no validity outside the human sphere. Might is right in Nature, or, rather, we are outside the standards of right and wrong in her sphere. Scientific knowledge certainly has a poetic side to it, but we do not go to chemistry or to geology or to botany for rules for the conduct of life. We go to these things mainly for the satisfaction which the knowledge of Nature's ways gives us.

So with natural history. For my own part I find the life-histories of the wild creatures about me, their ways of getting on in the world, their joys, their fears, their successes, their failures, their instincts, their intelligence, intensely interesting without any ulterior considerations. I am not looking for ethical or poetic values. I am looking for natural truths. I am less interested in the sermons in stones than I am in the life under the stones. The significance of the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly does not escape me, but I am more occupied with the way the caterpillar weaves her cocoon and hangs herself up for the winter than I am in this lesson. I had rather see a worm cast its skin than see a king crowned. I had rather see Ph?be building her mud nest than the preacher writing his sermon. I had rather see the big moth emerge from her cocoon-fresh and untouched as a coin that moment from the die-than the most fashionable "coming out" that society ever knew. The first song sparrow or bluebird or robin in spring, or the first hepatica or arbutus or violet, or the first clover or pond-lily in summer-must we demand some mystic password of them? Must we not love them for their own sake, ere they will seem worthy of our love?

To convert natural facts into metaphysical values, or into moral or poetic values-in short, to make literature out of science-is a high achievement, and is worthy of Emerson at his best, but to claim that this is their sole or main use is to push idealism to the extreme. The poet, the artist, the nature writer not only mixes his colors with his brains, he mixes them with his heart's blood. Hence his pictures attract us without doing violence to nature.

We will not deny Emerson his right to make poetry out of nature; we bless him for the inspiration he has drawn from this source, for his "Wood-notes," his "Humble-Bee," his "Titmouse," his "May-Day," his "Sea-Shore," his "Snow-Storm," and many other poems. But we must "quarrel" with him a little, to use one of his favorite words, for seeming to undervalue the facts of natural science, as such, and to belittle the works of the natural historian because he does not give us poetry and lessons in morals instead of botany and geology and ornithology, pure and simple. "Everything," he says, "should be treated poetically-law, politics, housekeeping, money. A judge and a banker must drive their craft poetically, as well as a dancer or a scribe. That is, they must exert that higher vision which causes the object to become fluid and plastic." "If you would write a code, or logarithms, or a cook-book, you cannot spare the poetic impulse." "No one will doubt that battles can be fought poetically who reads Plutarch or Las Casas."

We are interested in the wild life around us because the lives of the wild creatures in a measure parallel our own; because they are the partakers of the same bounty of nature that we are; they are fruit of the same biological tree. We are interested in knowing how they get on in the world. Bird and bee, fish and man, are all made of one stuff, are all akin. The evolutionary impulse that brought man, brought his dog and horse. Did Emerson, indeed, only go to nature as he went to the bank, to make a draft upon it? Was his walk barren that brought him no image, no new idea? Was the day wasted that did not add a new line to his verse? He appears to have gone up and down the land seeking images. He was so firmly persuaded that there is not a passage in the human soul, perhaps not a shade of thought, but has its emblem in nature, that he was ever on the alert to discover these relations of his own mind to the external world. "I see the law of Nature equally exemplified in bar-room and in a saloon of the philosopher. I get instruction and the opportunities of my genius indifferently in all places, companies, and pursuits, so only there be antagonisms."

Emerson thought that science as such bereaved Nature of her charm. To the man of little or no imagination or sensibility to beauty, Nature has no charm anyhow, but if he have these gifts, they will certainly survive scientific knowledge, and be quickened and heightened by it.

After we have learned all that the astronomers can tell us about the midnight heavens, do we look up at the stars with less wonder and awe? After we have learned all that the chemist and the physicist can tell us about matter-its interior activities and its exterior laws and relations-do we admire and marvel less? After the geologist has told us all he has found out about the earth's crust and the rocks, when we quarry our building-stone, do we plough and hoe and plant its soil with less interest and veneration? No, science as the pursuit of truth causes light to spring out of the abysmal darkness, and enhances our love and interest in Nature. Is the return of the seasons less welcome because we know the cause? Is an eclipse less startling because it occurs exactly on time? Science bereaves Nature of her dread and fearsomeness, it breaks the spell which the ignorance and credulity of men have cast upon her.

Emerson had little use for science except so far as it yielded him symbols and parables for his superscience. The electric spark did not kindle his interest unless it held an ethical fact for him; chemical reactions were dull affairs unless he could trace their laws in mental reactions. "Read chemistry a little," he said, "and you will quickly see that its laws and experiments will furnish an alphabet or vocabulary for all of your moral observations." He found a lesson in composition in the fact that the diamond and lampblack are the same substance differently arranged. Good writing, he said, is a chemical combination, and not a mechanical mixture. That is not the noblest chemistry that can extract sunshine from cucumbers, but that which can extract "honor from scamps, temperance from sots, energy from beggars, justice from thieves, benevolence from misers."

Though mindful of the birds and flowers and trees and rivers in his walks, it was mainly through his pressing need of figures and symbols for transcendental use. He says, "Whenever you enumerate a physical law, I hear in it a moral law." His final interest was in the moral law. Unless the scientific fact you brought him had some moral value, it made little impression upon him.

He admits he is more interested to know "why the star form is so oft repeated in botany, and why the number five is such a favorite with Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the formation of buds." His insight into Nature, and the prophetic character of his genius, are seen in many ways, among others in his anticipation or poetic forecast of the Darwinian theory of the origin of species, in 1853.

"We want a higher logic to put us in training for the laws of creation. How does the step forward from one species to a higher species of an existing genus take place? The ass is not the parent of the horse; no fish begets a bird. But the concurrence of new conditions necessitates a new object in which these conditions meet and flower. When the hour is struck in onward nature, announcing that all is ready for the birth of higher form and nobler function, not one pair of parents, but the whole consenting system thrills, yearns, and produces. It is a favorable aspect of planets and of elements."

In 1840 he wrote, "The method of advance in Nature is perpetual transformation." In the same year he wrote:

"There is no leap-not a shock of violence throughout nature. Man therefore must be predicted in the first chemical relation exhibited by the first atom. If we had eyes to see it, this bit of quartz would certify us of the necessity that man must exist as inevitably as the cities he has actually built."