EMERSON THE LECTURER. 155 



thinking &quot; that speak to us in this altogether unique lay- 

 preacher. We have shared in the beneficence of this varied 

 culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and speculation, 

 this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature which rather 

 stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If ever there 

 was 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 climacteric, 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 perceive 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 expedient 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 &quot; Criticism and Poetry,&quot; was quite 

 up to the level of old times, full of that power of strangely- 

 subtle association whose indirect approaches startle the 

 mind into almost painful attention, of those flashes of 

 mutual understanding between 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 



