MERSOX THE LECTURER. 377 



of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other 

 minds. Search for his eloquence in his books and you 

 will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that 

 it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith 

 of language he belongs to a better age than ours, and 

 might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne, though 

 he does use that abominable word reliable. His eye 

 for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like 

 that of a backwoodsman for a rifle ; and he will dredge 

 you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather 

 himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as 

 his I know not where to match in these days of writ 

 ing by the page ; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. 

 The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few 

 can find it. It is the open secret of all true genius. 

 It is wholesome to angle in those profound pools, though 

 one be rewarded with nothing more than the leap of 

 a fish that flashes his freckled side in the sun and as 

 suddenly absconds in the dark and dreamy waters again. 

 There is keen excitement, though there be no ponderable 

 acquisition. If we carry nothing home in our baskets, 

 there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated 

 blood. What does he mean, quotha] He means in 

 spiring hints, a divining-rod to your deeper nature. 

 No doubt, Emerson, like all original men, has his pecu 

 liar audience, and yet I know none that can hold a 

 promiscuous crowd in pleased attention so long as he. 

 As in all original men, there is something for every 

 ]>;il;ite. "Would you know," says Goethe, " the ripest 

 cherries? Ask the boys and the blackbirds." 



The announcement that such a pleasure as a new 

 course of lectures by him is coming, to people as old as 

 I am, is something like those forebodings of spring that 

 prepare us every year for a familiar novelty, none the 

 less novel, when it arrives, because it is familiar. We 



