314
RALPH WALDO EMERSON PART SECOND.
and we hear little or nothagain. Possibly some student of German Philosophy, even of Hegel, had flung it at him in a It is not one of his terms,
ing of
it
discussion. III.
Accordingly we are not surprised when we
learn that
Emerson
starts for
Europe
after
ponder
ing over the matter for some two or three years. Indeed we have to hold that in such decision he fol
lowed at
last his basic trend,
away from migration
to the
which turned him
West.
This latter he
entertained only in theory, while he would not or could not realize it practically. His ancestors had
not seriously stirred from the one locality for quite two centuries, forefather Peter Bulkeley seems to have exhausted the migratory spirit in the Emer sonian line of descent. Rather the movement will be
now backward,
to the earliest fountains of his
people s tradition. Again we have to ruminate a singular turn in the anti-traditional Emerson. But :
we have never
faile.d to find a deep strong under current of prescription beneath his furious torrent of defiance of all transmitted social order.
On October 5, 1847, Emerson sailed from Boston, and in a little over a fortnight landed at Liverpool, and thence proceeded soon to London, where he at once betook himself to the Carlyle house. It was ten o clock at night when "the door was opened to me by Jane Carlyle, and the man himself was be hind her with a lamp in the entry. They were very little changed from their old selves of fourteen