He belonged to humanity, but he detached himself.

He was a leader, but would acknowledge no discipline.

Men cried out to him, but he wandered apart.

He was an intellectual anarchist of rare and lovely type; few sweeter souls ever lived, but he defied order.
Not that Emerson would have been any better if he had submitted to the discipline of some church; he did what he felt impelled to do, and left the world a precious legacy of ideas, of brilliant, beautiful thoughts; but thoughts which are brilliant and beautiful as the stars are, scattered jewels against the background of night with no visible connection.

Is it not possible that the gracious discipline of an environment more conventional might have reduced these thoughts to some sort of order, brought the stars into constellations, and left suggestions for the ordering of life that would be of greater force and more permanent value?
His wife relates that one day he was reading an old sermon in the little room in the Follen mansion, when he stopped, and said, "The passage which I have just read I do not believe, but it was wrongly placed." The circumstance illustrates the openness and frankness of his mind, but it is also a commentary on the want of system in his intellectual processes.