EMERSON 167 
down, is identical with that of the great wits, namely, 
surprise. ‘The point of his remark or idea is always 
sprung upon the reader, never quietly laid before 
him. He has a mortal dread of tameness and flat- 
ness, and would make the very water we drink bite 
the tongue. 
He has been from the first a speaker and lecturer, 
and his style has been largely modeled according 
to the demand of those sharp, heady New England 
audiences for ceaseless intellectual friction and cha- 
fing. Hence every sentence is braided hard, and 
more or less knotted, and, though of silk, makes the 
mind tingle. He startles by overstatement, by un- 
derstatement, by paradox, by antithesis, and by syn- 
thesis. Into every sentence enters the unexpected, 
—the congruous leaping from the incongruous, the 
high coming down, the low springing up, likeness, 
relation suddenly coming into view where before was 
only difference or antagonism. How he delights to 
bring the reader up with a short turn, to impale him 
on a knotty point, to explode one of his verbal 
bombshells under his very nose! Yet there is no 
trickery or rhetorical legerdemain. His heroic fibre 
always saves him. 
The language in which Taine describes Bacon ap- 
plies with even more force to Emerson: — 
“Bacon,” he says, “is a producer of conceptions 
and of sentences. The matter being explored, he 
says tous: ‘Such it is; touch it not on that side; 
it must be approached from the other.’ Nothing 
more; no proof, no effort to convince; he affirms, 
