first step towards thinking greatly and freely on moral matters is to consult the world's accumulated wisdom. Hasty writers speak of his "jaunty" attitude towards the past. If he is jaunty about the past, it is because he is very familiar with it. What impresses the thoughtful student of his journals is his steady effort to hold himself and his contemporaries under the searching cross-lights of human experience. He reads Plato, Cicero, Hafiz, Confucius, Buddha, Mahomet, Dante, Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Napoleon, Coleridge, Carlyle, because that, he finds, is the effective way to set his own intelligence free, and because freedom, he finds, means ability to move at ease and as an equal among such minds as these.
But Emerson was also preserved from excessive individualism by a passion which, properly elevated and directed, may be a young man's guardian angel, the passion of ambition. "All young persons," he observes, "thirst for a real existence for a real object,—for something great and good which they shall do with their heart. Meanwhile they all pack gloves, or keep books, or travel, or draw indentures, or cajole old women." By habitual imaginative association with great men, he had assimilated their thoughts and virtues, and had accustomed himself to look forward with an almost Miltonic assurance to playing a part above the ordinary in the life of his country. At the age of twenty-one he is sketching a series of papers on the improvement of the
