CHAPTER XI.

1868-1873. ÆT. 65-70.

Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect. — Publication of "Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude; Civilization; Art; Eloquence; Domestic Life; Farming; Works and Days; Books; Clubs; Courage; Success; Old Age. Other Literary Labors. Visit to California. Burning of his House, and the Story of its Rebuilding.— Third Visit to Europe. - His Reception at Concord on his Return.

DURING three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, Emerson delivered a series of lectures at Harvard University on the "Natural History of the Intellect.” These lectures, as I am told by Dr. Emerson, cost him a great deal of labor, but I am not aware that they have been collected or reported. They will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an extract from Professor Thayer's "Western Journey with Mr. Emerson." He is there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics. It is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms employed by metaphysicians. If he does not hold the words "subject and object," with their adjectives, in the same contempt that Mr. Ruskin shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions. Once he ventures on the not me, but in the main he uses plain English handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ.

"Society and Solitude" was published in 1870.

The first essay in the volume bears the same name as the volume itself.

In this first essay, Emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims of solitary and social life. He recognizes the organic necessity of solitude. We are driven "as with whips into the desert." But there is danger in this seclusion. "Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them. . Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. . . . The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy."

The essay on Civilization is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a very agreeable way. The framed or stone house in place of the cave or the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the press, are well-worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with special brilliancy: :

"Right position of woman in the State is another index. Place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good

My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly:

"The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart, longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from home,

"The pulses of her iron heart

Go beating through the storm.""

I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be an incorrect version of these two from own called "The Steamboat: my

a poem

of

"The beating of her restless heart

Still sounding through the storm."

It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson's special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that

't is better to be quoted wrong Than to be quoted not at all.

This essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:

"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves."

"It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war, 'that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' HITCH YOUR WAGON TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way, Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules; every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote, justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility."

- Charles's

Charles's Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the same constellation; the Dipper is what our people often call it, and the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the North Star.

I find in the essay on Art many of the thoughts with which we are familiar in Emerson's poem, "The Problem." It will be enough to cite these passages:

"We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that is, had a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

"The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the tragedies of Eschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals, the plays of Shakespeare, all and each were made not for sport, but in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.

"The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid every stone.

"Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake, whose melody is sweeter than he knows."

The discourse on Eloquence is more systematic,

more professorial, than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its general purport:

"Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.

"He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character and insight. .

"The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.

"Its great masters . . were grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world and themselves also."

"Domestic Life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of the goblet which holds some tonic draught:

"Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child, the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation, soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. His flesh is angel's flesh, all alive. . . . All day, between his three or four sleeps, he cooes like a pigeon-house, sput