Emerson spoke up for the intellectual as well as religious independence ; he held that humanity had lost self-rule and self-reliance, that man was dominated by things rather than by thought. As a result of Emerson’s attack on the conventions, clergymen assailed his “heresies” and Harvard closed its lecture rooms to him. Thirty years later he received an honorary degree from Harvard and chosen one of its overseers. At sixty-seven he gave a course of philosophy at Cambridge.

The suavity of Emerson’s verse is deceptive. The surface is so limpid, so easily persuasive, that it appears conventional. But the ideas embodied in the poems are energetic and radical ideas ; they are, like Emerson himself, not only truth-loving but truth-living. They celebrate the democratic man, but they do not idealize him ; they recognize evil as well as good ; they regard doubt not as fixed denial but as “a cry for faith rising from the dust of dead creeds.” Even love, which demands every sacrifice, must be free from moral impositions; for “when half-gods go, the gods arrived.”