EMERSON THE LECTURER. 159 



country s intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus 

 of his teaching and example, how constantly he had kept 

 burning the beacon of 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. &quot;My 



