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Emerson was so emboldened by what had been achieved through the mastery of the earth’s forces that he was led to say that “a wise geology shall yet make the earthquake harmless, and the volcano an agricultural resource.” But this seems expecting too much. We have harnessed the lightnings, but the earthquake is too deep and too mighty for us. It is a steed upon which we cannot lay our hands. The volcano we may draw upon for heat and steam, as we do upon the winds and streams for power, but it is utterly beyond our control. The bending of the earth’s crust beneath the great atmospheric waves is something we cannot bridle. The tides by sea as by land are beyond us.

Emerson had the mind of the prophet and the seer, and was given to bold affirmations. The old Biblical distinction between the scribes and the man who speaks with authority still holds. We may say of all other New England essayists and poets–Lowell, Whipple, Tuckerman, Holmes, Hillard, Whittier, Longfellow–that they are scribes only. Emerson alone speaks as one having authority–the authority of the spirit. “Thus saith the Lord”–it is this tone that gives him his authority the world over.

I never tire of those heroic lines of his in which he sounds a battle-cry to the spirit:

“Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,–
”T is man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.'”

The last time I saw Emerson was at the Holmes seventieth-birthday breakfast in 1879. The serious break in his health had resulted in a marked aphasia, so that he could not speak the name of his nearest friend, nor answer the simplest question. Yet he was as serene as ever. Let the heavens fall–what matters it to me? his look seemed to say.

Emerson’s face had in it more of what we call the divine than had that of any other author of his time–that wonderful, kindly, wise smile–the smile of the soul–not merely the smile of good nature, but the smile of spiritual welcome and hospitality.

Emerson had quality. A good Emersonian will recognize any passage from the Sage in a book of quotations, even if no name is appended.

We speak of Emerson as outgrown, yet only yesterday I saw in J. Arthur Thomson’s recent Gifford Lectures on “The System of Animate Nature,” repeated quotations from Emerson, mainly from his poetry. I think he is no more likely to be outgrown than are Wordsworth and Arnold. Yet I do not set the same value upon his poetry that I do upon that of Wordsworth at his best.

Emerson is the last man we should expect to be guilty of misinterpreting Nature, yet he does so at times. He does so in this passage: “If Nature wants a thumb, she makes it at the cost of the arms and legs.” As if the arm were weaker or less efficient because of the thumb. What would man’s power be as a tool-using animal without his strong, opposable thumb? His grasp would be gone.

He says truly that the gruesome, the disgusting, the repellent are not fit subjects for cabinet pictures. The “sacred subjects” to which he objects probably refer to the Crucifixion–the nails through the hands and feet, and the crown of thorns. But to jump from that fact to the assertion that Nature covers up the skeleton on the same grounds, is absurd. Do not all vertebrates require an osseous system? In the radiates and articulates she puts the bony system on the outside, but when she comes to her backbone animals, she perforce puts her osseous system beneath. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and skin and hair over it, not to hide it, but to use it. Would you have a man like a jellyfish?

The same want of logic marks Carlyle’s mind when he says: “The drop by continually falling bores its way through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.” But give the “hasty torrent” the same time you give the drop, and see what it will do to the rock!