THOREAU. 197 



The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every 

 well-read critic must feel at once ; and so is that of 

 ^Eschylus, 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 distin 

 guished 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 emphat 

 ically one of these, and there is no man to whom our 

 aesthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan revolt had 

 made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically 

 independent, but we were still socially and intellectually 

 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 clus 

 tering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, 



