this old-fashioned creed. It suited, no doubt, the time and place. America, it has been said, is the land of hope; and in Emerson's youth some symptoms which alarm modern observers were hardly perceptible. When he came to England in 1847 he was shocked by the 'tragic spectacles' of misery and degradation in the streets of the great towns; and thanked God that his children were being brought up in a land where such things were unknown. The external circumstances help to explain the difference between him and Carlyle, upon whom the English pauperism and squalor had impressed the opposite lesson. But, apart from the surroundings, optimism is clearly of the essence of Emerson's temperament and philosophy. It is the teaching of the 'ecstatic state.' Wordsworth's nature-worship lifted him to the 'blessed mood' in which the
Burthen of the mystery
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened,
and enabled him to 'see into the life of things' and the harmony of the universe. With Emerson the 'blessed mood' becomes normal. The greatest teachers have seen that 'all nature is the rapid
