EMERSON THE LECTURER 379 



or phrase. The first lecture, to be sure, was more dis- 

 jointed 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 

 Becoud lecture, on " Criticism and Poetry," 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 Em 

 erson'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 above the subtler meaning of style. 

 He would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spenser, and some- 

 times mistakes the queer for the original. 



To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, 

 gift of life ; yet there are some of us who would hardly 

 consent to be young again, if it were at the cost of our 

 recollection of Mr. Emerson's first lectures during the 

 consulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in from the 

 country to the Masonic Temple (I think it was), through 

 the crisp winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice 

 of his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music, 

 as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that 

 came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might 

 say what they liked. Did our own imaginations trans- 

 figure dry remainder-biscuit into ambrosia? At any 

 rate, he brought us life, which, on the whole, is no bad 

 thing. Was it all transcendentalism 1 magic-lantern 

 pictures on mist ] As you will. Those, then, were just 

 what we wanted But it was not so. The delight and 

 the benefit were that he put us in communication with 



