This is the price he pays
for his transcendental insistence upon the supreme value of the
Now, the moment of insight. But after all these limitations are
properly set down, the personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains
a priceless possession to his countrymen. The austere serenity of
his life, and the perfection with which he represents the highest
type of his province and his era, will ultimately become blended
with the thought of his true Americanism. A democrat and
liberator, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like Lincoln to
become increasingly a world's figure, a friend and guide to
aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and creed are
negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and
the soul.
Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the
eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's
house on Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled
cannily at the notion that after fifty years their townsman's
literary works would be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume
edition, and that critics in his own country and in Europe would
rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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