EMERSON THE LECTURER. 275 



A sweet, attractive, kind of grace, 



A full assurance given by looks, 

 Continual comfort in a face, 



The lineaments of gospel books. 



We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are thought to 

 be fond of the spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more 

 remote from that than his. We are reckoned a practical folk, 

 who would rather hear about a new air-tight stove than about 

 Plato ; yet our favourite teacher s practicality is not in the least 

 of the Poor Richard variety. If he have any Buncombe con 

 stituency, it is that unrealised commonwealth of philosophers 

 which Plotinus proposed to establish ; and if he were to make 

 an almanack, his directions to farmers would be something like 

 this : OCTOBER -.Indian Summer j now is the time to get in 

 your early Vedas. What, then, is his secret ? Is it not that he out- 

 Yankees us all ? that his range includes us all ? that he is equally 

 at home with the potato-disease and original sin, with pegging 

 shoes and the Over-soul ? that, as we try all trades, so has he 

 tried all cultures ? and above all, that his mysticism gives us a 

 counterpoise to our super-practicality ? 



There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us*- 

 feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for 

 ennobling impulses none whom so many cannot abide. What 

 does he mean ? ask these last. Where is his system ? What is 

 the use of it all ? What the deuce have we to do with Brahma ? 

 I do not propose to write an essay on Emerson at this time. I 

 will only say that one may find grandeur and consolation in a 

 starlit night without caring to ask what it means, save grandeur 

 and consolation ; one may like Montaigne, as some ten genera 

 tions before us have done, without thinking him so systematic 

 as some more eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously emi 

 nent ?) authors ; one may think roses as good in their way as 

 cabbages, though the latter would make a better show in the 

 witness-box, if cross-examined as to their usefulness ; and . as 

 for Brahma, why, he can take care of himself, and won t bite 

 us at any rate. 



The bother with Mr. Emerson is that, though he writes in 

 prose, he is essentially a poet. If you undertake -to paraphrase 

 what he says, and to reduce it to words of one syllable for infant 

 minds, you will make as sad work of it as the good monk with 

 his analysis of Homer in the Epistolse Obscurorum Virorum. 

 We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our 

 age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it than 

 Iv s masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for 



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