280 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 



ing the story as it went along, and filling up the necessary gaps 

 in it from his own private store of memories. His younger 

 hearers could not know how much they owed to the benign im 

 personality, the quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the never- 

 sated hunger of self-culture, that were personified in the man 

 before them. But the older knew how much the country s 

 intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teaching 

 and example, how constantly he had kept burning the beacon ot 

 an ideal life above our lower region of turmoil. To him more 

 than to all other causes together did the young martyrs of our 

 civil war owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that 

 is so touching in every record of their lives. Those who are 

 grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are, for what they feel 

 to be most valuable in their culture, or perhaps I should say 

 their impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct teachings 

 of his as for that inspiring lift which only genius can give, and 

 without which all doctrine is chaff. 



This was something like the caret which some of us older 

 boys wished to fill up on the margin of the master s lecture. 

 Few men have been so much to so many, and through so large 

 a range of aptitudes and temperaments, and this simply because 

 all of us value manhood beyond any or all other qualities of 

 character. We may suspect in him, here and there, a certain 

 thinness and vagueness of quality ; but let the waters go over 

 him as they list, this masculine fibre of his will keep its lively 

 colour and its toughness of texture. I have heard some great 

 speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so 

 moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertow 

 in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their 

 foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would 

 not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long-studied 

 artist in these things) does the deliberate utterance, that seems 

 waiting for the fit word, seem to admit us partners in the labour 

 of thought, and make us feel as if the glance of humour were a 

 sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying written there 

 on the desk were as unexpected to him as to us ! In that 

 closely-filed speech of his at the Burns centenary dinner every 

 word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds. 

 He looked far away over the heads of his hearers, with a vague 

 kind of expectation, as into some private heaven of invention, 

 and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell. * My 

 dainty Ariel ! he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast down 

 Jiis eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of approval an4 



