The Last Harvest

om and pessimism of the old-a greater character, but a far less lambent and helpful spirit. Emerson seems to have been obsessed with the idea that a new and greater man was to appe

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iry miles will smooth rough Monadnoc to a gem," but he knew also that it would not change the character of Monadnoc. He knew that the past and the present, the near and the far, were made of one stuff. He united the courage of science with the sensibility of poetry. He would not be defrauded of the value of the present hour, or of the thoughts which he and other men think, or of the lives which they live to-day. "I will tell you how you can enrich me-if you will recommend to-day to me." His doctrine of self-reliance, which he preached in season and out of season, was ba

him only as it threw light upon to-day. History is a record of the universal mind; hence of your mind, of my mind-"all the facts of history pre?xist in the mind as laws." "What Plato thought, every man may think. What a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand." "All that Shakespear says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself"; and so on, seeing in history only biography, and interested in the past only as he can link it with the present

exaggerate the fact, and to give an undue bias in favor of the novel, the audacious, the revolutionary. His optimism carried him to great lengths. Many of the new stars in his literary firmament have quite faded out-all of them, I think, but Walt Whitman. It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremendous welcome to "Leaves of Grass"-a welcome that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had got so much more of the unconventional and the self-reliant than he had bargained for. I remember that when I spoke of Walt

three names surely, but who is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, that she should go in such a list? Reed, we learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a Swedenborgian,

literary genius; but the scholar, the catholic, cosmic intellect, Bacon's own son, the Lord Chief Justice on the Muse's Bench is"-who do you think, in 1847?-"Wilkinson"! Garth Wilkinson, who wrote a book on the human body. Emerson says of him in "English Traits": "There is in the action