Do we outgrow him?--or do we fall away from him?
I cannot bear to hear Emerson spoken of as a back-number, and I
should like to believe that the young men of to-day find in him
what I found in him fifty years ago, when he seemed to whet my
appetite for high ideals by referring to that hunger that could
"eat the solar system like gingercake." But I suspect they do not.
The world is too much with us. We are prone to hitch our wagon to
a star in a way, or in a spirit, that does not sanctify the wagon,
but debases the star. Emerson is perhaps too exceptional to take
his place among the small band of the really first-class writers of
the world. Shear him of his paradoxes, of his surprises, of his
sudden inversions, of his taking sallies in the face of the common
reason, and appraise him for his real mastery over the elements of
life and of the mind, as we do Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle,
and he will be found wanting. And yet, let me quickly add, there
is something more precious and divine about him than about any
or all the others. He prepares the way for a greater than he,
prepares the mind to accept the new man, the new thought, as none
other does.
But how slow I am in getting at my point! Emerson took me captive.
For a time I lived and moved and had my intellectual being in him.
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