who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my Saying, 'What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?' my friend suggested,—'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.'
"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A men is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions."
"The strongest influences in his development," writes one of Emerson's biographers, "were the liberating philosophy of Coleridge, the mystical visions of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of Wordsworth, and the stimulating essays of Carlyle."
In 1832 Emerson went to Europe, almost for the special purpose of meeting Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle and Wordsworth. "His visit to Carlyle," says his biographer, "in the lonely farmhouse at Craigenputtock, was the memorable beginning of a lifelong friendship. … Emerson was a sweet-tempered Carlyle, living in the sunshine. Carlyle was a militant Emerson, moving amid thunderclouds."
On his voyage home from this visit Emerson wrote in his Diary: "A man contains all that
