THOREAU. 141 



read critic must feel at once ; and so is that of JEschylus, 

 so is that of Dante, so is that of Montaigne, so is that of 

 Schiller, so is that of nearly every one except Shakespeare ; 

 but there is a gauge of height no less than of breadth, of 

 individuality as well as of comprehensiveness, and, above 

 all, there is the standard of genetic power, the test of the 

 masculine as distinguished from the receptive minds. 

 There are staminate plants in literature, that make no fine 

 show of fruit, but without whose pollen, quintessence of 

 fructifying gold, the garden had been barren. Emerson s 

 mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no man to 

 whom our aBsthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan 

 revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution 

 politically independent, but we were still socially and intel 

 lectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the 

 cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of 

 blue water. No man young enough to have felt it can forget, 

 or cease to be grateful for, the mental and moral nudge which 

 he received from the writings of his high-minded and brave- 

 spirited countryman. That we agree with him, or that he 

 always agrees with himself, is aside from the question ; but 

 that he arouses in us something that we are the better for 

 having awakened, whether that something be of opposition 

 or assent, that he speaks always to what is highest and 

 least selfish in us, few Americans of the generation younger 

 than his own would be disposed to deny. His oration 

 before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, some 

 thirty years ago, was an event without any former 

 parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always 

 treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its 

 inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what 

 windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of 

 approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent ! It was 

 our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard 

 parallel to the last public appearances of Schelling. 



We said that the Transcendental Movement was the 

 Protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and 

 an escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather 



