152 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 



Montaigne ; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine 

 glass; compared with his, all other books of similar aim, 

 even White s &quot;Selborne,&quot; seem dry as a country clergy 

 man s meteorological journal in an old almanack. He 

 belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis ; if not with 

 the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class 

 who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible 

 thought-seed like ferns. 



EMERSON THE LECTURER. 



IT is a singular fact that Mr. Emerson is the most steadily 

 attractive lecturer in America. Into that somewhat cold- 

 waterish region adventurers of the sensational kind come 

 down now and then with a splash, to become disregarded 

 King Logs before the next season. But Mr. Emerson 

 always draws. A lecturer now for something like a third 

 of a century, one of the pioneers of the lecturing system, 

 the charm of his voice, his manner, and his matter has 

 never lost its powers over his earlier hearers, and con 

 tinually winds new ones in its enchanting meshes. What 

 they do not fully understand they take on trust, and listen, 

 saying to themselves, as the old poet of Sir Philip 

 Sidney : 



&quot;A sweet, attractive, kind of grace, 

 A full assurance given by looks, 

 Continual comfort in a face, 

 The lineaments of gospel books.&quot; 



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 constituency, it is that unrealised common 

 wealth of philosophers which Plotinus proposed to establish ; 



