it shall lack a present popularity.  That it should not be known seems possible, for if a memoir of Laplace had been thrown into that muck-heap of Fraser’s Magazine, who would be the wiser?  But this has too much wit and imagination not to strike a class who would not care for it as a faithful mirror of this very Hour.  But you know the proverb, “To be fortunate, be not too wise.”  The great men of the day are on a plane so low as to be thoroughly intelligible to the vulgar.  Nevertheless, as God maketh the world forevermore, whatever the devils may seem to do, so the thoughts of the best minds always become the last opinion of Society.  Truth is ever born in a manger, but is compensated by living till it has all souls for its kingdom.  Far, far better seems to me the unpopularity of this Philosophical Poem (shall I call it?) than the adulation that followed your eminent friend Goethe.  With him I am becoming better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration.  It is a singular piece of good-nature in you to apotheosize him.  I cannot but regard it as his misfortune, with conspicuous bad influence on his genius, that velvet life he led.  What incongruity for genius, whose fit ornaments and reliefs are poverty and hatred, to repose fifty years on chairs of state and what pity that his Duke did not cut off his head to save him from the mean end (forgive) of retiring from the municipal incense “to arrange tastefully his gifts and medals”!  Then the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he.  We can tolerate vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the brute majority in defence of some human principle.  The sympathy his manhood and his misfortunes call out adopts even his faults; but genius pampered, acknowledged, crowned, can only retain our sympathy by turning the same force once expended against outward enemies now against inward, and carrying forward and planting the standard of Oromasdes so many leagues farther on into the envious Dark.  Failing this, it loses its nature and becomes talent, according to the definition,—­mere skill in attaining vulgar ends.  A certain wonderful friend of mine said that “a false priest is the falsest of false things.”  But what makes the priest?  A cassock?  O Diogenes!  Or the power (and thence the call) to teach man’s duties as they flow from the Superhuman?  Is not he who perceives and proclaims the Superhumanities, he who has once intelligently pronounced the words “Self-Renouncement,” “Invisible Leader,” “Heavenly Powers of Sorrow,” and so on, forever the liege of the same?

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* Emerson uniformly spells this name “Teufelsdroch.”
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Then to write luxuriously is not the same thing as to live so, but a new and worse offence.  It implies an intellectual defect also, the not perceiving that the present corrupt condition of human nature (which condition this harlot muse helps to perpetuate) is a temporary or superficial state.  The good word lasts forever:  the impure word can only buoy itself in the gross gas that now envelops us, and will sink altogether to ground as that works itself clear in the everlasting effort of God.