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have deserved nothing; according to Adam Smith's idea of society, 'done nothing; doing nothing, never expect to; yet joying in existence, perhaps striving to beautify one individual of God's creation.

“Our civilization is not always mending our poetry. It is sauced and spiced with our complexity of arts and inventions, but lacks somewhat of the grandeur that belongs to a Doric and unphilosophical age. In a religious contemplative public it would have less outward variety, but simpler and grander means; a few pulsations of created beings, a few successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament, enable us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories, to do more, to date the revela

tions of God to man. But these lamps are held to measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history of God's operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying, acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity. Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approach to God. And the gray-headed god throws his shadows all around, and his slaves catch, now at this, now at that one; at the halo he throws around poetry or pebbles, bugs or bubbles. Sometimes they climb, sometimes creep into the meanest holes; but they are all alike in vanishing, like the shadow of a cloud."

To her nephew Charles: "War; what do I think of it? Why, in your ear I think it so much better than oppression, that if it were ravaging the whole geography of despotism it would be an omen of high and glorious import. Channing paints its miseries, but

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does he know tnose of a worse war, private animosities, pinching, bitter warfare of the human heart, the cruel oppression of the poor by the rich, which corrupts old worlds? How much better, more honest, are storming and conflagration of towns! They are but letting blood which corrupts into worms and dragons. A war-trump would be harmony to the jars of theologians and statesmen such as the papers bring. It was the glory of the Chosen People; nay, it is said there was war in Heaven. War is among the means of discipline, the rough meliorators, and no worse than the strife with poverty, malice, and ignorance. War devastates the conscience of men. Yet corrupt peace does not less. And if you tell me of the miseries of the battle-field, with the sensitive Channing (of whose love of life I am ashamed), what of a few days of agony, what of a vulture being the bier, tomb, and parson of a hero, compared to the long years of sticking on a bed and wished away? For the widows and orphans - Oh, I could give facts of the long-drawn years of imprisoned minds and hearts, which uneducated orphans endure!

"O Time! thou loiterer, thou whose might has laid low the vastest and crushed the worm, restest on thy hoary throne, with like potency over thy agitations and thy graves, oh when will thy routines give way to higher and lasting institutions? When thy trophies and thy name and all its wizard forms be lost in the Genius of Eternity? In Eternity, no deceitful promises, no fantastic illusions, no riddles concealed by thy shrouds, none of thy Arachnean webs, which decoy and destroy. Hasten to finish thy motley work, on which frightful Gorgons are at play, spite of holy ghosts. 'Tis already moth-eaten, and its shuttles quaver, as the beams of the loom are shaken.

"25, Saturday. Hail, requiem of departed Time! Never was incumbent's

funeral followed by expectant heir with more satisfaction. Yet not his hope is mine. For in the weary womb are prolific numbers of the same sad hour, colored by the memory of defeats in virtue, by the prophecy of others, more dreary, blind and sickly. Yet He who formed thy web, who stretched thy warp from long ages, has graciously given man to throw his shuttle, or feel he does, and irradiate the filling woof with many a flowery rainbow, labors, rather, evanescent efforts, which will wear like flowerets in brighter soils; has attuned his mind in such unison with the harp of the universe that he is never without some chord of hope's music. 'Tis not in the nature of existence, while there is a God, to be without the pale of excitement. When the dreamy pages of life seem all turned and folded down to very weariness, even this idea of those who fill the hour with crowded virtues lifts the spectator to other worlds, and he adores the eternal purposes of Him who lifteth up and casteth down, bringeth to dust and raiseth to the skies. 'Tis a strange deficiency in Brougham's title of a System of Natural Theology, when the moral constitution of the being for whom these contrivances were made is not recognized. The wonderful inhabitant of the building to which unknown ages were the mechanics is left out as to that part where the Creator had put his own lighted candle, placed a vicegerent. Not to complain of the poor old earth's chaotic state, brought so near in its long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist. Yet its youthful charms as decked by the hand of Moses' Cosmogony will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to Science. Yet there is a sombre music in the whirl of times so long gone by. And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give the idea of the Infinite far, far better than when dignified with arts and industry: its oceans, when beating the symbols of ceaseless ages, than when covered with

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cargoes of war and oppression. grand its preparation for souls, — souls who were to feel the Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions and applied its steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither psy chology nor element.

"September, 1836. Vale. The mys tic dream which is shed over the season. Oh to dream more deeply; to lose external objects a little more! Yet the hold on them is so slight that duty is lost sight of, perhaps, at times. Sadness is better than walking, talking, acting somnambulism. Yes, this entire solitude with the Being who makes the powers of life! Even Fame, which lives in other states of Virtue, palls. Usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being ab sorbed in God, retaining consciousness. Number the waste places of the journey, the secret martyrdom of youth, heavier than the stake, I thought; the narrow limits which know no outlet, the bitter dregs of the cup, — and all are sweetened by the purpose of Him I love. The idea of being no mate for those intellectualists I've loved to admire is no pain. Hereafter the same solitary joy will go with me, were I not to live, as I expect, in the vision of the Infinite. Never do the feelings of the Infinite, and the consciousness of finite frailty and ignorance, harmonize so well as at this mystic season in the deserts of life. Contradictions, the modern Ger man says, of the Infinite and Finite.”

I sometimes fancy I detect in Miss Emerson's writings a certain — shall I say polite and courtly homage to the name and dignity of Jesus, not at all spontaneous, but growing out of her respect to the Revelation, and really veiling and betraying her organic dislike to any interference, any mediation between her and the Author of her being, assurance of whose direct dealing with her she incessantly invokes for example, the parenthesis, "Saving thy pres

ence, Priest and Medium of all this approach for a sinful creature!" "Were it possible that the Creator was not virtually present with the spirits and bodies which He has made, if it were in the nature of things possible He could withdraw himself, I would hold on to the faith that, at some moment of His existence, I was present: that, though cast from Him, my sorrows, my ignorance and meanness were a part of His plan; my death, too,- however long and tediously delayed to prayer, was decreed, was fixed. Oh how weary in youth more so scarcely now, not when ever I can breathe, as it seems, the atmosphere of the Omnipresence: then I ask not faith nor knowledge; honors, pleasures, labors, I always refuse, compared to this divine partaking of existence; but how rare, how dependent on the organs through which the soul operates!

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"The sickness of the last week was fine medicine; pain disintegrated the spirit, or became spiritual. I rose, — I felt that I had given to God more perhaps than an angel could, had promised Him in youth that to be a blot on this fair world at His command would be acceptable. Constantly offer myself to continue the obscurest and loneliest thing ever heard of with one proviso, His agency. Yes, love Thee, and all Thou dost, while Thou sheddest frost and darkness on every path of mine."

For years she had her bed made in the form of a coffin; and delighted herself with the discovery of the figure of a coffin made every evening on their sidewalk by the shadow of a church tower which adjoined the house.

Saladin caused his shroud to be made, and carried it to battle as his standard. She made up her shroud, and death still refusing to come, and she thinking it a pity to let it lie idle, wore it as a nightgown, or a day-gown, nay, went out to ride in it, on horseback, in her mountain roads, until it was worn out. Then

she had another made up, and as she never traveled without being provided for this dear and indispensable contingency, I believe, she wore out a great many.

"1833. I have given up, the last year or two, the hope of dying. In the lowest ebb of health nothing is ominous; diet and exercise restore. So it seems best to get that very humbling business of insurance. I enter my dear sixty the last of this month."

Oh

"1835, June 16. Tedious indisposition; hoped, as it took a new form, it would open the cool, sweet grave. Now existence itself in any form is sweet. Away with knowledge; - God alone. He communicates this our condition and humble waiting, or I should never perceive Him. Science, Nature, — oh I've yearned to open some page; not now, too late. Ill health and nerves. dear worms, how they will at some sure time take down this tedious tabernacle, most valuable companions, instructors in the science of mind, by gnawing away the meshes which have chained it. A very Beatrice in showing the Paradise. Yes, I irk under contact with forms of depravity, while I am resigned to being nothing, never expect a palm, a laurel, hereafter."

"1826, July. If one could choose, and without crime be gibbeted, were it not altogether better than the long drooping away by age without mentality or devotion? The vulture and crow would caw, caw, and, unconscious of any deformity in the mutilated body, would relish their meal, make no grimace of affected sympathy, nor suffer any real compassion. I pray to die, though happier myriads and mine own companions press nearer to the throne. His coldest beam will purify and render me forever holy. Had I the highest place of acquisition and diffusing virtue here, the principle of human sympathy would be too strong for that rapt emotion, that severe delight which I crave; nay, for that

kind of obscure virtue which is so rich to lay at the feet of the Author of morality. Those economists (Adam Smith) who say nothing is added to the wealth of a nation but what is dug out of the earth, and that, whatever disposition of virtue may exist, unless something is done for society, deserves no fame, why, I am content with such paradoxical kind of facts; but one secret sentiment of virtue, disinterested (or perhaps not), is worthy, and will tell, in the world of spirits, of God's immediate presence, more than the blood of many a martyr who has it not." "I have heard that the greatest geniuses have died ignorant of their power and influence on the arts and sciences. I believe thus much, that their large perception consumed their egotism, or made it impossible for them to make small calculations."

"That greatest of all gifts, however small my power of receiving, the capacity, the element to love the All-perfect, without regard to personal happiness; happiness, — 't is itself."

She checks herself amid her passionate prayers for immediate communion with God: "I who never made a sacrifice to record, I cowering in the nest of quiet for so many years; I indulge the delight of sympathizing with great virtues, blessing their Original: have I this right?"

"While I am sympathizing in the government of God over the world, perhaps I lose nearer views. Well I learned his existence a priori. No object of science or observation ever was pointed out to me by my poor aunt, but His Being and commands; and oh how much I trusted Him with every event till I learned the order of human events from the pressure of wants."

"What a timid, ungrateful creature! Fear the deepest pitfalls of age, when pressing on, in imagination at least, to Him with whom a day is a thousand years, with whom all miseries and ir

regularities are conforming to universal

good! Shame on me who have learned within three years to sit whole days in peace and enjoyment without the least apparent benefit to any, or knowledge to myself, resigned, too, to the memory of long years of slavery passed in labor and ignorance, to the loss of that character which I once thought and felt so sure of, without ever being conscious of acting from calculation."

Her friends used to say to her, "I wish you joy of the worm ;" and when at last her release arrived, the event of her death had really such a comic tinge in the eyes of every one who knew her that her friends feared they might, at her funeral, not dare to look at each other, lest they should forget the serious proprieties of the hour.

She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply. It is frivolous to ask, "And was she ever a Christian in practice?" Cassandra uttered, to a frivolous, skeptical time, the arcana of the Gods, but it is easy to believe that Cassandra domesticated in a lady's house would have proved a troublesome boarder. Is it the less desirable to have the lofty abstractions because the abstractionist is nervous and irritable? Shall we not keep Flamsteed and Herschel in the observatory, though it should even be proved that they neglected to rectify their own kitchen clock? It is essential to the safety of every mackerel fisher that latitudes and longitudes should be astronomically ascertained; and so every banker, shopkeeper and wood-sawyer has a stake in the elevation of the moral code by saint and prophet. Very rightly, then, the Christian ages proceeding on a grand instinct have said: Faith alone, faith alone.

I confess that when I read these papers I do not feel that religion has

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