retrospective spirit of our age that would "put the living generation into masquerade out of the faded wardrobe of the past." He will not see through the eyes of others. "Why should not we also," he demands, "enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? The sun shines to-day also! Let us demand our own works, and laws, and worship."

In the Essay on Self-reliance—a title which might over-ride a great portion of his writings—he says: "Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination makes fools of us, plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work: but the things of life are the same to both: the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderberg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous: did they wear out virtue?" And in a more sublime mood he proceeds: "Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples fall. Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of the soul.... Man is timid and apologetic. He is no longer upright. He dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses, or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose,—perfect in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he, too, lives with nature in the present, above time."

Surely these quotations alone—which we have made with the additional motive of introducing at once to our readers the happier style and manner of the American Philosopher—would bear out the French or German critic in their views of the nationality of this author. The spirit of the New World, and of a self-confident democracy, could not be more faithfully translated into the language of a high and abstract philosophy than it is here. We say that an air blowing from prairie and forest, and the New Western World, is felt in the tone and spirit of Emerson's writings; we do not intend to intimate that the opinions expressed in them are at all times such as might be anticipated from an American. Far from it. Mr Emerson regards the world from a peculiar point of view, that of an idealistic philosophy. Moreover, he is one of those wilful, capricious, though powerful thinkers, whose opinions it would not be very easy to anticipate, who balk all prediction, who defy augury.

For instance, a foreigner might naturally expect to find in the speculations of a New England philosopher, certain sanguine and enthusiastic views of the future condition of society. He will not find them here. Our idealist levels the past to the present, but he levels the future to the present also. If with him all that is old is new, so also all that is new is old. It is still the one great universal mind—like the great ocean—ebbing, flowing, in tempest now, and now in calm. He will not join in the shout that sees a new sun rising on the world. For ourselves, (albeit little given to the too sanguine mood) we have more hope here than our author has expressed. We by no means subscribe to the following sentence. The measure of truth it expresses—and so well expresses—bears but a small proportion to the whole truth. "All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves. Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilised, it is christianised, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal strength the white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave. The civilised man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but loses so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a christianity (entrenched in establishments and forms) some vigour of wild virtue. For every stoic was a stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?"

A French critic has designated Emerson the American Montaigne, struck, we presume by his independence of manner, and a certain egotism which when accompanied by genius is as attractive, as it is ludicrous without that accompaniment. An English reader will be occasionally reminded of the manner of Sir Thomas Brown, author of the "Religio Medici." Like Sir Thomas, he sometimes startles us by a curiosity of reflection, fitted to suggest and kindle thought, although to a dry logician it may seem a mere futility, or the idle play of imagination. Of course this similarity is to be traced only in single and detached passages; but we think we could select several quotations from the American writer which should pass off as choice morsels of Sir Thomas Brown, with one who was familiar with the strain of thought of the old Englishman, but whose memory was not of that formidable exactness as to render vain all attempt at imposition. Take the following for an instance:—"I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As long as the Caucasian man—perhaps longer—these creatures have kept their council beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has passed from the one to the other.... I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called history is. How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople. What does Rome know of rat or lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighbouring systems of being?"

Or this:—"Why should we make it a point to disparage that man we are, and that form of being assigned to us? A good man is contented. I love and honour Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour, than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying 'he acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good, when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.