Excerpt from Masters of Literature, Emerson Criticism is te-born with every generation, and in biography not less than in the domain of pure ideas will find new points of view on old topics. So it is that great men, like great stars, appear and te-appear, not, indeed, in regular procession, but as now one, now another represents a motif to which the mind of the age most deeply responds and though the greatest are like what we call the fixed stars, less variable, new eyes with new instruments will find perpetually in them fresh meaning. The best available estimate of Ralph Waldo Emerson - Lord Morley's - is now twenty seven years old, and it already fails in some degree to meet the needs of the youth of our own day, or, as they would say, to do full justice to its subject. When time has wrought changes of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turn in giving a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideas and points of view that are worth preserving. Inter pretation of this kind, thought the Morley of so long a quarter-century ago, Emerson cannot require. It is not, surely, any disrespect to this distinguished survivor of Victorian criticism to feel that the deep changes of mental as well as social fashion which have, in fact, been wrought in this period must modify more than one of his conclusions. The Victorian era is at an end; its giants, who exercised their wits by placing each other, lie dead together. We look at them from a different level, still too often through inherited glasses. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.