Such, slightly and inadequately sketched, is Emerson's view of the moral life of man. My friends, it is my religion, a truth sufficient to enable me, when I am faithful to it, to live strongly and joyfully ; a truth, I believe, by which any soul may enter any future with confidence and peace.

Wickedness may fill the earth and manifold corruptions taint society, but they that see that the law of the universe is the moral law, that morality is the soul's lawfulness and health and order, will be paralyzed by no thought of "moral interregnums." The immoral year is but the world's diastole. Tiberius is Christianity's gymnasium, and papal Borgias and Medicis manure the Reformation. Morality is sure, because it is of the nature of things; but immorality is depravity. Crowd the cork to the bottom, but every atom is crowded up forever by the picture it carries of the sky. Morality has far deeper foundations than our passing purposes. Reality does not humor our imaginings. This one laments this other's atheism, as though his atheism cancelled God. And this one writes, "I was, but am not" on his tombstone, heedless of the smiles of the stars at the fatuity that fails to see that only an I am has any message. So fatuous is the thought that the universe leaves its morality to accident. "The conscience of man," says Emerson, " is regenerated as is the atmosphere, so that society cannot be debauched. The health which we call virtue is an equipoise which easily redresses itself, and resembles those rocking

stones which a child's finger can move, and a weight of many hundred tons cannot overthrow." Churches many and creeds many pass away, and "in the rapid decay of what was called religion timid and unthinking people fancy a decay of the hope of man;" but they that see the law "believe that man need not fear the want of religion, because they know his religious constitution,- that he must rest on the moral and religious sentiments, as the motion of bodies rests on geometry." "As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within his own mind,-is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste, all draw their essence from this moral sentiment, then we have a religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the private action."

X.

EMERSON'S RELATION TO SOCIETY.

BY MRS. JULIA WARD HOWE.

WHAT is society? or, if it comes to that, what was society? In the first place, an assemblage of human creatures whose humanity consisted largely in their power of discrimination and comparison between the various objects and advantages of life. Animals have habits, passions, affections, preferences, reasonings. Man must have always been able to compare the objects of these with a standard existing in his own mind, and then to compare them with each other. In this comparison, poor and rudimentary as it must once have been, the greater good constantly gained upon the lesser. The advantage of alliance was found to be greater than that of discord. Law was recognized as better than violence, temperance prevailed over excess, industry was seen to be more productive than rapine. The power of thought asserted its right to a nobler employment than the devising of fables for the superstitious, or of artifices for the covetous and ambitious. And so by slow steps we come from prehistoric man to the nineteenth century, and to that

part of it in which the heaven of New England was bright with particular stars. We who were accustomed to the presence of these stars in the social firmament took very insufficient note of them. Which of us stops to rave about the sunlight, glorious and wonderful fact though it be? Take it away, and we recognize its constant and supreme office. While we have it, our life and it are so at one that we cannot much notice it.

Mr. Emerson's years surpassed by nine man's threescore and ten. His intellectual activity covers the whole period intervening between his early manhood and his seventy-first year. Yet I cannot find in what I have known of this time any evidence that the community at large felt itself either richer or safer for his presence. If this was true of the business world, it was equally true of the world of fashion. If I remember rightly, there were many years of his life in which his words and works were valued by a very small number of people. Has he not himself said, turning his face from his own Boston,

"Good-by, proud world! I'm going home;

Thou art not my friend, and I'm not-thine"?

The next strophe may tell us what he had seen there:

"Good-by to Flattery's fawning face;

To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
To upstart Wealth's averted eye;
To supple Office, low and high;
To crowded halls, to court and street,

To frozen hearts and hasting feet."

And a little further on he says:

"When I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,

I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,

At the sophist schools, and the learned clan."

Even the recognized literary men of the time paid him little attention. The elder Dana, in those days at least, would have classed him with those whom he esteemed as eccentric disturbers of peace and religion. C. C. Felton, while professor of Greek at Harvard, wrote a notice of one of his books, which he compared to the orange-peel and water mentioned by Dickens's Little Marchioness, with the explanation that, "If you make believe very much, it is very good."

I remember having been sharply called to account some forty-five years ago for advising an acquaintance to attend the first course of lectures which he gave in New York; and I remember thinking that from an orthodox point of view I had been a little imprudent in so doing. In those days, and long after, Cambridge held him in doubtful and supercilious consideration. The world of fashion only in rare instances knew enough of him to laugh at him. Of course, there were exceptions to this. I think it must have been in 1843 that I heard of his having been invited after one of his lectures in Boston to the house of Mr. Nathan Appleton; and the friend who mentioned this to me appeared much edified at the countenance thereby given to Mr. Emerson.

It would be instructive for us to compare Mr.