of his being was ethical; for we have seen that the center of his being was religious. We may dismiss, also, the popular error of regarding him as a representative of Puritan decadence; for we have seen that he represents rather a renascence and fresh flowering of the ancient passion for self-perfection. We think rightly of Emerson when we think of him as a humanist bent upon liberating and developing not some but all of the properly human powers. He builds his many-chambered house of life around a private oratory, because like every successfully exploring humanist, he finds a private oratory at the center of his heart. But this innermost shrine of religious inspiration is emphatically not a Calvinistic chapel, hostile to the arts. It is a retreat friendly to all the Muses that ever haunted Siloa's brook or Heliconian springs.
Emerson believed, indeed, like his great predecessor of the seventeenth century, that the pulsing spirit which "voluntary moves harmonious numbers" prefers before all temples "the upright heart and pure." But no one who has approached that inner shrine will ever picture him as summoning the Sacred Nine about him in order to give them a lesson in conduct. No one understands Emerson who fails to perceive that he trusts his inspiration, like a Pythian prophet, like a celebrant of Dionysian mysteries. "If I am the devil's child," he defiantly retorted in his youth to one who had urged him to beware of his instincts, "I will live from the devil."
