that fate "is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought" carries much the same meaning. The statement, finally, that "what is" not only "must be" but "ought to be" distinguishes stoical resignation from joyous submission to an order of things that we can recognize, even though it was not designed for our convenience or even for our edification, as "best" in some final sense. Emerson's completion of this pregnant phrase by the addition of "ought" to "is" transforms fate into providence.

As Melville understood, more clearly than most of Emerson's critics, this is "theology," Calvinist theology at that; but what Melville intended as a reproach might better be taken as a compliment. Emerson retains the moral realism of his ancestors, while discarding their anthropomorphic conception of God. If God is pure being, he can no longer be adequately characterized as a "sovereign," much less a "father." But neither can he be dispensed with. Only the acknowledgment that "what is must be and ought to be, or is the best," overcomes the tyranny of fate.

"Fate" is late Emerson and contains a hint of second thoughts, a modification of what he may have come to regard as an excessively bucolic view of nature. But his mature view had already taken shape as early as 1841, when he announced his theory of "compensation," the principle that ran through all his subsequent writings. "Compensation," the third of his Essays: First Series, clarifies Emerson's relation to his Puritan forefathers and also to the producer ideology of Anglo-American populism.

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makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering." Deeply offended by the idea that evil originates in "human crime," Melville correctly identified its source and even acknowledged the "nobility" of Emerson's thought. "Look squarely at this," he wrote beside the offending passage, "and what is it but mere theology—Calvinism? The brook shows the stain of the banks it has passed through. Still, these essays are noble."

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