IN LITERATURE
Such a poet, to name a second, is Emerson. He, also, is not famous for any grasp on reality. His fame, however, does him injustice. He was indeed a mystic, and much of his teaching seems to belittle the facts of life, the terms on which we move in this present world. But he did not belittle facts, nor undervalue whatever is actual. There is no real power, he taught, which is not based on nature, and the beginning of power is the belief that things go not by luck, but by law. Even when the mystic in him was uppermost, he often meant in a nobly practical way what we have taken as an extravagance of idealism. "Hitch your wagon to a star." We translate "aim high"—but that was not his meaning. He meant that we should be scientific, if you choose—that having learned to wonder at the laws and forces of the universe, we should
[165]
