own bible by hearkening to all those sentences which now here, now there, now in nursery rhymes, now in Hebrew, now in English bards, thrill him like the sound of a trumpet." In fulfilment of that design Emerson wrote his great essays.
To many a lonely student, obscure and friendless, meditating in the long cold spring and adolescence of his talent on his untried powers, Emerson has come as with the sound of a magical trumpet, shattering the dungeons of fear, sending the young knight on his quest inwardly fortified and resolute to give soul and body to that undertaking, whatever it may be, for which he was sent into the world. Such is the primary function of the religious and democratic ethos with which he sought to impregnate American letters. He, too, had been lonely, obscure, uncertain of his way, feeble, and prone to husband his strength and gifts. But when he found which way the planets are going and the well where the gods drink, he faltered no longer. "What a discovery I made one day, that the more I spent the more I grew, that it was as easy to occupy a large place and do much work as an obscure place to do little; and that in the winter in which I communicated all my results to classes, I was full of new thoughts." To this, let us add that other thought, so precious to him that it appears repeatedly in various forms in the Journals and in the essays: "If a man knows the law, he may settle himself in a shanty in a pine forest, and men will
