is the basis of so much satisfaction and discontent, was alien to his soul. He loved mankind, but not men; and his avoidance of intimacies saved him much wear and tear. Mr. Brownell says that he did not care enough about his friends to discriminate between them, which was the reason he estimated Alcott so highly.
This immense power of withdrawal, this concentration upon the things of the spirit, made possible Emerson's intellectual life. He may have been, as Santayana says, "impervious to the evidence of evil"; yet there breaks from his heart an occasional sigh over the low ebb of the world's virtue, or an entirely human admission that the hopes of the morning are followed by the ennui of noon. Sustained by the supremacy of the moral law, and by a profound and majestic belief in the invincible justice, the "loaded dice" of God, he sums up in careful words his
