EMERSON THE LECTURER. 277 



a standing testimonial to the cumulative power and value of 

 Character (and we need it sadly in these days), we have it in 

 this gracious and dignified presence. What an antiseptic is a 

 pure life ! At sixty-five (or two years beyond his grand climac 

 teric, as he would prefer to call it) he has that privilege of soul 

 which abolishes the calendar, and presents him to us always the 

 unwasted contemporary of his own prime. I do not know if he 

 seem old to his younger hearers, but we who have known him 

 so long wonder at the tenacity with which he maintains himself 

 even in the outposts of youth. I suppose it is not the Emerson 

 of 1868 to whom we listen. For us the whole life of the man is 

 distilled in the clear drop of every sentence, and behind each 

 word we divine the force of a noble character, the weight of a 

 large capital of thinking and being. We do not go to hear what 

 Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson. Not that we per 

 ceive any falling-off in anything that ever was essential to the 

 charm of Mr. Emerson s peculiar style of thought or phrase. 

 The first lecture, to be sure, was more disjointed even than 

 common. It was as if, after vainly trying to get his paragraphs 

 into sequence and order, he had at last tried the desperate ex 

 pedient of shuffling them. It was chaos come again, but it was 

 a chaos full of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces. The 

 second lecture, on Criticism and Poetry/ was quite up to the 

 level of old times, full of that power of strangely-subtle asso 

 ciation whose indirect approaches startle the mind into almost 

 painful attention, of those flashes of mutual understanding be 

 tween speaker and hearer that are gone ere one can say it 

 lightens. The vice of Emerson s criticism seems to be, that 

 while no man is so sensitive to what is poetical, few men are less 

 sensible than he of what makes a poem. He values the solid 

 meaning of thought above the subtler meaning of style. He 

 would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spenser, and sometimes mis 

 takes the queer for the original. 



To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift ot 

 life ; yet there are some of us who would hardly consent to be 

 young again, if it were at the cost of our recollection of Mr. 

 Emerson s first lectures during the consulate of Van Buren. 

 We used to walk in from the country to the Masonic Temple 

 (I think it was), through the crisp winter night, and listen to 

 that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle meaning and 

 subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship 

 that came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might 

 ^ay what they liked- Did our own imaginations transfigure dry 



